
Class 1 



Book v , 



Gop>TightK°_ 



COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT. 



CARTOONS OF THE 
ETERNAL COMPASSION 



CARTOONS OF 
THE ETERNAL 
COMPASSION ** 

CLOUGH A. WATERFIELD 

f\ 



PRESS OF THE PUBLISHING HOUSE OF 
THEM. E. CHURCH, SOUTH 






HOV 16 131/ 



Copyrieht, 1917, by C. A. Waterfietd 

Od '•177616 



TO ALL PREACHERS 

NEAR - PREACHERS EX - PREACHERS 

THOUGHT-TO - BE OUGHT - TO - BE 

GOING -TO -BE PREACHERS 

OUR PRECIOUS SELVES 

—BRAVO 

AND 

AMEN! 



WHAT WE HAVE HERE 
For Introduction— 

THE WHEAT THRASHER 

Then— 

I. THE IMMINENT DUTY 

— A Cartoon of Adventure 17 

II. LOST: JOHN WESLEY 

—A Cartoon of a Supreme Preacher . . 49 

III. THE BOOK OF BOOKS 

— A Cartoon of the Good News . . . Ill 

IV. TO MEN OF ARMS.— OF LEGS ALSO 

—A Cartoon of the World's Work . . 129 

V. THE CALL OF MICHELANGELO 

—A Cartoon of Steadfastness . . . . 151 



The horses are led by the pond before 
going to the pole of their chaff-choking 
circuit; swart men fresh from the night, 
whose bedding has been the straw and 
the stars; teamsters on the wide- winged 
frames to bring the shocks, whistling, 
bantering; rattling gear, cracking whips, 
water boys, a devoted dog or two, and you 
are there — if you can only keep out of the 
way. 

But principally, as we were saying, the 
Feeder. Let that capital stay. The uni- 
verse floats and laves and swirls about 
him, glancing for a start out from his 
coign of vantage on the vessel's bridge 
over an ocean of gold and green and far- 
away blue. Shirt open at the neck, not 
after the mode of Byron, but of that better 
poet, Business. Hat — well, chiefly such 
as you fail to note at all; it might have 
been a cap; hardly a tile. Arms brown, 
bare and brown; muscles corded like the 
twisted strength of ever-fed mountain 
brooks running over rocks. And — quiet. 
The most unspeaking man of the field: 
not with the omniscient bull-stare of total 
ignorance, but with the pent eloquence of 
10 



the full day's purpose. For his role is to 
be a livelong race against the combined 
work of all the others — organized, as they 
are, for what else but to heave up work 
and trouble to him? Their day of dew 
and blue and gold is for him an assured 
day of dust puddled with sweat, of catch 
and scratch and thrust and strain, and— 
then more of it and more, with no time 
nor mind for fine fancies about it. Some- 
body else finds the partridge nest. The 
tumult and the shouting over the dog 
fight dies on his vaguely conscious ears. 
A race between two laden teams, of which 
one overturns, one triumphs, and he may 
hear of it that night. 

And all the time from front and flank 
and side they gather and fetch and hurl 
to him. From down by the creek border, 
where the drivers snatch blackberries and 
talk sweethearts, the darkest, heaviest 
shocks; from beyond the bosoming up- 
land, over by the road where they cry the 
day with the constable riding past; from 
up along the orchard where the women 
call for a lift in the sunning of the feather 
beds and reward with a cup or three of 
ii 



buttermilk — Wheat! Wheat, however, 
with cockle, darnel, and thistle. Wheat 
with alien sassafras and unprofitable per- 
simmon. Wheat with smiling but bitter 
fennel. Wheat with beard, chaff, straw, 
the very earth mingled, caked, and cling- 
ing. It surges up to him and breaks over 
him in billows — 

The league-long rollers along the reef. 

While the summer morning whitens, 
like platinum in the laboratory, up to the 
glister of the fierce noon and straight on 
out into the time test of the griddle-red 
afternoon. While the sun pours down his 
full quivers of blistering arrows on his 
back, there on the very seat of endurance, 
where the ribs grasp the spine. While the 
dust boils from the sieves beneath him 
and swarms and chokes at the portals of 
being — eye, ear, nose, and throat. 

Still from shoulder socket and knotted 
brown arm and old kitchen knife, sharp- 
ened, the gleaming strokes leap out for 
the straw cords of the flying sheaves. 

Yet somebody has said to a pastor- 
preacher: "When are you going to write 
12 



something? You ought to write." Why, 
is not your very word "pastor" the ro- 
mance language for "feeder"? 

Wheat, then, wheat of all the glowing, 
glorious field. Ah ! the best of it is, there's 
wheat. But the bush, the vine, the tare 
that come up with it — from the newspa- 
pers, the mails, the house groups and 
neighborhood coteries, the wide-winged 
literary programs and theology institutes, 
with a tangle of science and a brush of 
administration to make it a plenty; from 
the political dog fights, Sunday school 
partridge nests, commencement June ap- 
ple opportunities, women's society feath- 
er bed problems, and milk pitcher compli- 
ments ; with smarting fennel and irritating 
thistle prick of booksellers' statements 
and bank overchecks toward the year-end. 

Brother Feeder (now we will let the 
capital stand, won't we?), Old Bringer-Up 
and Pusher-In of everything you can lay 
hands on from that quavering, pulpit- 
feeding funnel of yours — 

Two things: 

i. Do you wonder sometimes how long 
you can keep it up? Do you catch your- 
13 



self watching yourself over the shoulder 
to discover with what ease, effectuality, 
and sustained sincerity you do the shift? 

2. And do you ache with inextinguisha- 
ble desire now and again to catch up, in a 
way, and to straighten up, step down, and 
spit on your hands one last time, throw 
the old knife at a stump, see it stick and 
quiver there, while you go a little out of 
the clutter for a good look out over the 
whole field and to get a little of the range 
and big relations of things? 

Come on, then. For the matter is that 
of bread and hunger and help — human and 
divine. And out over the dust of count- 
less common topics and piecemeal prob- 
lems, of ancient conflicts now burnt out, 
and of present warrings which will have 
their day and pass, lo, yonder in the pur- 
ple and gold of your westering, well-spent 
day — how, above all, the story gathers it- 
self in a sheaf of cartoons — Cartoons of 
the Eternal Compassion. 
14 



THE IMMINENT DUTY 



A Cartoon of Adventur 



It is told of a famous general that on one occasion, 
when mounting to make charge on a certain height, 
the subaltern who helped him to his horse observed 
that the general's knees were shaking, and remarked 
on the fact 

**lf they knew/ said Stonewall Jackson — "// they 
knew where I am going to take them, they would 
tremble more!" 



THE IMMINENT DUTY 

A Cartoon of Adventure 

^Si F the workman is worthy of his hire, 
*|| yet beyond them both lies the long- 
^-^ neglected third term to the compact, 
the work itself. When the workman hath 
heard the angelus and passed from the 
field, arid when his hire is spent and well 
forgotten, the work itself is still afield 
and must follow on, we think, indefinitely. 
To be sure, even fiction, the Entertainer, 
cannot seemingly get on without the min- 
ister, but must make him its piece de 
resistance, whilst for his hire and what he 
does with it everybody is so concerned 
that Madame Everybody will keep her 
husband up a weary Saturday night to 
follow through at a sitting the epic of "A 
Circuit Rider's Wife." Yet in any serious 
account of the affair one feels persuaded 
that it cannot be in the minister himself 
nor in his wage nor wit-flinging wife, but 
in the output and value of his work, that 
this wide romance of interest resides. 
And this omitted third term in the ancient 
2 17 



ethical proverb, this pith and girth and 
get-somewhere of the first-class preach- 
ing-man's task and prospect, may well be 
expected to have no little to do with the 
spirit and effect of the couriers of the 
Eternal Compassion. 

Looked at every way, then, the work- 
man is worthy of his hire, but the great 
thing is the work. In short, whatever the 
outcome of any war or income of any non- 
war, somebody must bear onward the 
Great Tidings, and the inspiration, the en- 
listment, and the training of preachers for 
to-day — that is the imminent duty. And 
manifestly if it be a duty, it will concern 
that inspiration, enlistment, and training 
largely on the human side. The mystical, 
vital matter of his calling will require 
other space. All vital and ultimate mat- 
ters are mystical, and they commonly re- 
quire other space. 

The need for any training of preachers 
at all has an acknowledgment which is as 
yet mainly an academic one; and that 
measure of acknowledgment, like that 
kind of training alone, will by no means 
meet the demand. 

18 



It is to this day the tenacious sentiment 
amongst general bodies of religious peo- 
ple that their preachers are men called 
and sent from God, or that they ought to 
be and claim to be. And no man who 
knows the people will care to question 
that their custom, supported by this pious 
and time-honored theory, is to follow the 
line of least resistance and take them as 
they come. Even when they finally object 
to their preacher on the ground of his 
unfittedness it does not follow that they 
know what they want in his successor; 
and even when this is true it seldom 
enough appears that they know what they 
ought to want. Commonly they seem 
content to leave both the calling and the 
fitting to Providence, reserving to them- 
selves the right of "enjoying" him, criti- 
cizing him, obstructing him, and, as histo- 
ry has it, of crucifying him in the sequel. 

It is, furthermore, the manifest feeling 
of the preachers themselves that their vo- 
cation and mission do in some way ex- 
empt them from the same necessity and 
measure of training to which men of other 
callings must conform. 
19 



Training of preachers for to-day is a 
notion which holds the acquiescence of 
some, the suspicion of others, and the 
working support of a few. And this few, 
it might be again remarked, are for the 
most part among the college messieurs 
and high-grade doctors of the law. 

Whether it is efficient or desirable to 
have this to be the condition of affairs is 
an inquiry which is not now before us. 
But the actual state of the matter, I think 
we will all agree, is that the people and 
their preachers strongly conceive that 
there is something exalted, objective, and 
eternal pertaining to the preaching minis- 
try, insusceptible alike to the innovations 
of to-day and the surprises of to-morrow, 
even as it has been in its habit unplastic to 
the fashions and mutations of the past. 

Will it not be, therefore, incumbent on 
us, out of all scientific and just-minded 
considerations, to give to these popular 
and professional conceptions of the case 
the recognition and the weight to which 
as facts they are entitled? In other 
words, is it either fair or efficient for us 
to call on the body of the ministry and 
20 



membership of the Churches to put them- 
selves out of themselves, to relate them- 
selves to objective reality and break from 
their blind attachment to traditions and 
prejudices on the subject, whilst we our- 
selves forthwith plunge headlong into the 
one-sided study of these, to them, novel 
discoveries and theories of ours? 

The plain truth is, there has been and 
there is in our interminable talk about the 
"new" changes, "new" conditions, and 
"new" demands room enough for the all- 
but-complete obscuration, if not to many 
the utter loss, of the saving ideal of a 
God-sent, Heaven-inspired, Eternity-prin- 
cipled preacher. 

The scientific spirit which we profess 
ought to carry us at least far enough to 
discover that there is a pre-occupation and 
a cant of the new as well as a pre-judg- 
ment and a cant of the old — a superficial 
whistling along the curbstones of to-day 
to match the unwholesome whining along 
the hedgerows of yesterday. It would 
seem as little as our confident modern ed- 
ucation could do that it should recognize 
that the trouble, after all, has been not 
21 



alone, perhaps not principally, with the 
untrained preacher, but also and chiefly 
with the preacher who is uninitiated, with 
the unsolemnized hurrying into the minis- 
try, when they do enter, out of homes un- 
hallowed and out of a Church which has 
come perilously near to letting fall from 
her consciousness and pass from her pro- 
gram the awful issue of life and death in 
a vagrant endeavor to keep vogue with 
the Attic curiosity and the Corinthian 
luxury of that ephemeral demigod which 
we call To-Day. 

In the first year of my ministry I had 
the honor to serve the Gleason Circuit. 
And if there are some of you who do not 
know where the Gleason Circuit is, there 
are those who do know. On the snowy 
November morning after my arrival upon 
the ground a generous and to this day 
well-beloved country doctor proffered me 
the use of a horse. For a winter I used 
him, for a winter tended him with my own 
hands, talked to him, trained him with all 
the enthusiasm and resolution of my own 
romantic theories as to what a Methodist 
preacher's horse ought to be, anyhow. 
22 



Unfortunately, he had never been called 
to be a circuit rider's mount, and would 
bring to-day at the prevailing high prices 
something like sixty-five dollars if he 
could by any possible calculation be sup- 
posed to be yet alive. He had been settled 
off on me by the shrewd prudence of a 
kind-hearted, horse-trading doctor who 
was not averse to finding a winter's keep 
for his colt, and who was even far more 
strongly actuated by the religious habit 
of doing good. 

Beloved doctor and faithful friend across 
the years, you and I and Bonham must go 
down here together once more as the joint 
representatives of the Quixotism which 
has a thousand times attended the initia- 
tion and training of the preacher, put up 
to it by the fond desire of family ambition 
and held down to it by the expectation of 
his wife's relatives, all mixed with the 
sentiment of a noble service, and too 
eagerly accepted by a romance-minded 
Church with her own ideas as to what a 
preacher-called-of-God ought to be, any- 
way. 

Let us ask room, if we are to escape a 
23 



callow conceit as well as avoid a stupid 
bigotry, here to register an earnest belief 
that the ills of the preaching, which we all 
have heard and done, spring at bottom, 
not so much from deficiency in the train- 
ing for to-day, urgent and alarming as 
that deficiency may appear, as from the 
want of a solemn and fitly inspired induc- 
tion into the holy office on yesterday, and 
that the remedy will lie, not so much in a 
better discipline, indispensable as that im- 
provement will be found, as in the recov- 
ery and the employment of a more serious 
and worthy fundamental conception on 
the part of us all concerning its function, 
its obligation, and its peerless opportunity 
in the world's work and in the world's re- 
ward. And — 

THE INSTRUMENT OF IT 

It will be no new instrument. The new 
thought, the new educational ideal, and 
the new truth are new in no essential re- 
spect. All that is level and lasting in 
them is cognate with the old. The great- 
est Innovator the world has known came 
not to destroy, but to fulfill. 
24 



"These words which I command thee 
this day shall be in thine heart ; and thou 
shalt teach [literally, "whet"] them dili- 
gently unto thy children; and talk of 
them when thou sittest in thine house; 
and when thou walkest by the way." 
(Moses.) "But the word of the Lord was 
unto them precept upon precept, precept 
upon precept; line upon line, line upon 
line; here a little, there a little." (Isaiah.) 
"But the path of the just is as the shining 
light [literally, "light of dawn"] that shin- 
eth more and more unto the perfect day." 
(Solomon.) "For by him were all things 
created that are in heaven and that are 
in earth, visible and invisible, whether 
thrones or dominions or principalities or 
powers; all things were created by him 
and for him. . . . Neither count I myself 
to have apprehended . . . the excellen- 
cy of the knowledge. . . . For the Son 
of God, Jesus Christ, who was preached 
among you by us, by me and Sylvanus 
and Timotheus, was not yea and nay, but 
in him is the Yea, . . . and ye are com- 
plete in him." (Paul.) "But grow in the 
grace and knowledge of our Lord and 
25 



Saviour Jesus Christ." (Peter.) "Come 
unto me, . . . take my yoke, . . . and 
learn of me. . . . Howbeit when he, the 
Spirit of truth, is come, he will guide you 
into all truth, . . . and will bring to 
your remembrance and will show you 
things to come." (Jesus.) 

Now, is not all this pregnant and potent 
enough with an "educational ideal," with 
a progressive psychology, and with a suf- 
ficient program of new truth? Says Dr. 
William P. Faunce : "From a purely intel- 
lectual point of view, the Bible has per- 
formed a vastly greater educative service 
than the entire classical literature of the 
Greeks and Romans." And Mr. Glad- 
stone averred in his larger way that the 
whole body of Grecian culture — its archi- 
tecture, painting, music, poetry, philoso- 
phy, and statesmanship — will be found 
not to have contributed so much of solace 
and of light to the race as the single book 
of the Psalms. Whilst Mr. D. L. Moody 
ought to be permitted to witness in this 
cause, that the thirteenth chapter of First 
Corinthians, if read once a week, even 
without note or comment, for seven years, 
26 



will absolutely transform the character of 
any man. 

All this Biblical tribute, however, falls 
far short of the goal; and what we shall 
have first of all to do for the training of 
preachers for their task of transforming 
the character of this world and its men is 
to carry them back of Faunce, beyond 
Gladstone, and past everybody else to the 
Book itself. Not Fairbairn, with his great 
philosophies of its teachings; not Bruce 
and Cuthbert Hall, with their deep exe- 
geses and wide applications of them; not 
Drummond, with his hand grasping the 
prism of the greatest thing in the world; 
not John Watson, with his sweeping, re- 
sistless harp song of God's message to the 
human soul ; nor Phillips Brooks, with his 
Bethlehem chant ; nor Lyman Abbott, lift- 
ing with his firm, cold fingers the curtains 
to the other room; nor Sam Jones and 
Billy Sunday, with their pleading tongues 
that forget their texts, but follow their 
people ; nor Coe and James and Sir Oliver 
Lodge, with their cautious, splendid, and 
comforting confirmations; nor Roosevelt, 
Taft, Bryan, and Ambassador Bryce, with 
27 



their multitudinous missionary corrobora- 
tions ; nor the Sunday editions of the big 
journals, with their salvos of applause, re- 
lieving the crime displays ; nor even those 
whole shelves of cold-storage comment in 
"The World's Best Sermons"— not one of 
these nor all of them, nor yet the habit of 
thought which they or any of them have 
evoked, how invaluable soever their great 
voice combined, may be suffered for the 
preacher of to-day to eclipse the great 
Book itself which has been the lamp unto 
his feet, and which must, even when 
lamps have gone to junk and given place 
to the modern municipal dynamo, make 
the light unto his path. 

And this is not bibliolatry. It is science. 
For if it is scientific to inquire, is it not 
also and equally scientific to keep? Is it 
our notion of science that a man is to be 
forever running from dune to dune on the 
shifting desert of human probability, kick- 
ing up here a little dust of truth and there 
a little silica of certainty, like children 
playing on the fringes of things and cry- 
ing: "Here, I have it! Here it all is! 
This new ant heap is the new universal 
28 



geography!"? If it is necessary, as it is 
necessary, in order to complete the sum 
of knowledge, that we shall inquire and 
steadily advance, will it not also be possi- 
ble to spill and waste and dessicate knowl- 
edge and life by continually casting away 
as worthless that which we have already 
won and at such cost? What is the use, 
aptly inquires somebody, of having two 
Isaiahs when we don't read the one we 
have? 

Somebody has gone to college and lost 
a book into whose depths of wisdom all 
the colleges of the world could be cast 
with no very great commotion on its sur- 
face. Somebody has stayed away from 
college and not found the power to fling 
novels and newspapers, poems and post- 
office politics, commentaries, belles-lettres, 
and almanacs into the salt seas. In this 
age of ink it is going to be a question 
whether a man of God will be able to cast 
back the cold type of all human learning 
of which a man may be possessed into the 
molten fires of that great, hot linotype pot, 
the Bible, the mighty message from which 
it all came, thence to issue again in the 
29 



letters of a valid, mobile, and living wit- 
ness to the affairs of men no less than the 
affairs of God. 

All of which will mean not that we are 
to know less of science, read less of fiction, 
fail of apperception to the times in which 
our lives are cast. For many of us it will 
surely mean that we shall be called on to 
know and perceive vastly more, lest we 
have nothing to cast back into the lino- 
type pot. But it does imply that we who 
are assuming or striving to be the preach- 
ers for to-day shall come somewhere to an 
end of apologizing and running up the 
helpless flag of a hump-backed and depre- 
catory interrogation point before the 
guesses and opinions of this passing day 
and world, and that in the heritage of all 
the days and in the light of all the worlds 
we shall speak forth in God's name what- 
ever of the everlasting "Yea" his Spirit 
hath spoken to us. Otherwise we are 
mere dilettanti of doubt ourselves, going 
about chirping of altruistic service and the 
like ; and what can we accomplish for any 
day but add to its darkness and deepen its 
despair? 

30 



THE SPIRIT OF IT 

Enthusiasm is not a popular word in 
the laboratory. If words might be imag- 
ined to hold personal relationships, as 
when we look at them more closely they 
appear almost to do, this word, of etymol- 
ogy dubious, would be supposed to carry 
in verbal society a sense of being persona 
non grata to its smart, correct brothers 
with their pedigrees brought along and 
embroidered on their suffixes. 

Yet the thing we are considering is not 
the correctness of words, but the rights of 
men — the right of a man to feel ; to expe- 
rience and to express, as the myriad- 
tongued sea, the rise of the tide which is 
the resultant of the forces that play upon 
him and within him from around and be- 
neath and above; in short, to take some 
interest in himself and in the thing he is 
doing and in the world he is passing 
through but this once. Now, the man 
and his work of which we are speaking is 
the preacher and his preaching; and we 
need not shrink from uttering a most firm 
conviction that, so far as the enlistment 
of preachers goes, it will be found an ab- 
3i 



solutely indispensable thing that they win 
the privilege and generate the passion of 
a great joy in the business of preaching 
viewed as a whole. 

But there is a class of minds that do not 
hesitate to pull to pieces the underpinning 
of a man's faith without going to the trou- 
ble even to brace it pending the operation, 
far less to supply anything in the way of 
a permanent substitute. In my boyhood, 
before I learned to swim and as I was 
standing knee-deep in the river, a big, 
swift man seized me and flung me out in 
the current. When I had strangled and 
fought my way to shore in some way, it 
was with an oath between the teeth that 
if I ever lived to be a man I would kill 
that bully. Well enough, the oath has 
been outgrown and forgotten. But will 
not this fairly represent the just indigna- 
tion which one may confess for the intel- 
lectual and spiritual smarty who would 
drown a soul in despair and rob it of all 
right to feel and find its own way to the 
mid-current of the river of life? 

Was it not Dr. Richard Storrs who de- 
clared that he found himself at the end of 
32 



his seminary course a poorer preacher 
than at its beginning? Let this by no 
means be taken as an argument against 
the possible value of such a course. The 
trouble is with that word, that thing, that 
spirit of the preaching ministry and, there- 
fore, of the preacher's training, which, for 
want of a better designation, we may ven- 
ture to call enthusiasm. What he meant 
was that, whereas at the beginning of 
those three years he was able to say, with 
the ancient and deep-hearted poet, "All 
my springs are in thee," at their conclu- 
sion he could not bring himself to say 
aught of any springs whatever, seeing 
that he had only a hydrant, and that with 
the meter taken out and the supply cut 
off, pending the reaction in chemics as to 
whether there were not a trace of H2S 
(rotten eggs) in the system, and the prob- 
lem in ethics as to what ought to be the 
hours of the stokers at the pow r er house. 

Now, if all this, or even a good part of 
this, be true; if enthusiasm is a state, a 
working factor, a thing at all ; then, so far 
from its being beneath the just regard of 
the scientific spirit, the scientific spirit be- 
3 33 



lies itself and is falsely so called when it 
fails to recognize and rejoice in it and 
with it. 

What, then, are the legitimate grounds 
and the adequate sources of this honest 
and effectual enthusiasm, this kind that 
must suffuse the preaching in which any- 
body is going to believe a fig's worth, this 
quality which must sweeten and fire the 
injunctions that anybody is going to stop 
any plows to go and execute? 

I beg to answer in part : In all the past 
three interests have prompted and sus- 
tained the enthusiasm of life, and they 
have been Sport, War, and the Passion 
of Personality. 

i. Is it true, as has been asserted, that 
the aggressive fight for righteousness is 
the finest sport in the world? Is it just to 
the solemn dignity of human life to con- 
strue this whole grave business of living 
and of setting life right, as the preachers 
are called on to do, in terms of a great 
game? As an athletic pitting of powers 
against powers? As the marshaling of all 
good against all evil on the desperate grid- 
iron of destiny? And then to take sides 
34 



and go in and lay out all to see that the 
good game shall not be lost? This, to be 
sure, is but one way, but it is one way and 
a telling way of looking at it, and we are 
studying the working value of this view of 
life to your young prophets to be. Has it 
any virile and human appeal to something 
that is primal and best within them? Men 
race for the poles of the earth. Is it in- 
conceivable that they should lay them- 
selves out for the gates of heaven? They 
compete for the supremacy of the realms 
of the air. Is the same elemental princi- 
ple not transferable to the quest for the 
kingdom of God? They drill for war, 
embark in business, and play politics. 
Shall the zest for righteousness and the 
achieving of the will of Jesus be the only 
goal unworthy and unable to kindle the 
ambition and bestir the primeval game- 
lust of young men? Not so in the robust 
imagination of St. Paul, who, having 
seen the young men contending on the 
Roman stadium and writing to the Church 
at Corinth, shouts with his pen : "I there- 
fore so run not as uncertainly; so fight I 
not as one that beateth the air." Not so 
35 



in the report from our brother prophets 
yonder in other lands, facing the severest 
difficulties that anywhere oppose the her- 
alds of the kingdom of God ; for they who 
travel most amongst them and know them 
best assert that these are the most cheer- 
ful of all the serious men of the kingdom. 
What if there be in the very consecration 
and solemn severance of their life to one 
fine and high end the, to us, long-lost se- 
cret of a plucky, glad gameness, the want 
of which has at once blurred our vision 
and impoverished our ministry! Of 
whom, after all, was it declared that for 
the joy that was set before him he en- 
dured the Cross, despising shame? 

2. Our stirring psychologist, Mr. James, 
before he passed on, reading well the in- 
centives and responses of men out of the 
old conflicts with centaur and saracen, 
with pirate, viking, and marshal, was in- 
sisting that what we must find, if we are 
to continue to enlist men for serious liv- 
ing, is a moral equivalent for war. Well, 
let us only open our ears to the moral 
drum-roll, the tremor and rhythm of the 
moving forces. To have for a man's fa- 
36 



therland the Empire of All Goodness! 
For a national impulse the patriotism of 
the Kingdom of Heaven! To set before 
this young preaching recruit the casus 
belli of that opening passage of "The Pas- 
sion Play," where, following a swift 
sketch of Creation in its high purpose, 
the scene is shifted at once to the Temple, 
wherein the traders have defiled the 
King's court and made the Father's house 
a den of thieves with bartering over the 
ruck and feathers of oil, pigeons, and the 
like, and wherein the Prince of the world's 
saving indignation hath come to over- 
throw their vandal, jangling tables and 
scourge them forth. The perfect and uni- 
versal chivalry of every devil to be routed 
and every palsied life upraised and re- 
deemed; of little children made confident 
and unafraid in the streets ; of the outcast 
and abused and bedeviled restored and 
encouraged, having the lamp relighted in 
the dome of reason, and the hard and bit- 
ter and filthy mind melted to tears and 
transformed to joy; of ghosts of supersti- 
tion allayed, grinning dogmas baffled, the 
hearts and hearthsides of all men made 
37 



sweet and fragrant and free in the liberty 
of the sons of God ! What other man, like 
the soldier of the Cross, may invoke 
sources of a passionate zeal for the blame- 
less war of the skies such as these? 

If an old woman of Japan, whose son 
in the great war would not go to the front 
for the duty he owed her, herself took the 
ancestral sword, tied a note to its handle 
bidding him go, and in heathen fashion 
cut her throat to be out of his way, what 
poverty or black death may not come to 
be felt as cheap and paltry when we have 
got well in view and kept well in our 
hearts the war prize, not of a cherry 
wreath or a mikado's smile, but of a world 
of brothers redeemed and an empire of the 
Almighty God, the All-Good Father, and 
of Jesus, his Son, our Prince, established 
everywhere ? 

3. And under the very constitution of 
human nature it is legitimate to inquire 
if in this Christian calling provision is 
made for the appeal of any such incentive 
as the passion of personality. Can a man 
know God and Christ? And can he come 
to love the name and will and personality 
38 



of that Being in any influencing, com- 
manding, and sustaining way? In the 
face of all the science and all the sunlight 
that ever was, is there any rational answer 
to the touching leaderless cry of human- 
ity's great heart, "Sir, we would see Je- 
sus"? Is there really any sweet and all- 
potent romance of the inner life in terms 
of "Jesus, Lover of my Soul"? Or will 
this, too, pass with the other religious 
ragtime? 

Richard Steele, the early English hu- 
morist, asserted that to love a beautiful 
woman was the equivalent of a liberal 
education. Now, a liberal education is a 
coveted and great prize. It has been 
found to furnish men with a world of new 
incentives and mighty staying powers, 
and that is precisely what we are looking 
into. If, then— and it is a perfectly le- 
gitimate question — if the love of a beau- 
tiful v/oman is the equivalent of a liberal 
education, what may it not be worth to 
love God and to find in the imperious, glad 
regnancy and elevation of that love affair 
of the whole life of a man the answering, 
unchanging faithfulness of that Love who, 
39 



having loved his own, loved them to the 
end? One knows what the love of young 
lovers will do. Who has not witnessed 
the green of their foolish embarrassment 
blossom to the purple passion of holy 
wedlock and ripen on to the incommuni- 
cable joy of a golden old age? Who has 
not gone with the mirthful party to the 
station and heard the mother, under 
promise not to cry, smother her sobs at 
the rending of the roots of her life as her 
darling passed out into the far country to 
find her home? We know, too, the love 
of a strong man, when his face whitens 
with purpose and you instinctively keep 
silence and pass from the room and leave 
him alone. You have seen it alter his 
business, teach him another trade, twist 
as a tornado the lines of his natural life, 
change his residence, illumine his con- 
duct, and touch with mystic transforma- 
tion the heart and strength of his man- 
hood. Ah! is the love of a man for God 
and the love of God for a man to be not 
unlike that? Hush ! Men do not talk too 
much of such things — 
40 



But what to those who find? Ah! this 
Nor tongue nor pen can show: 

The love of Jesus what it is 
None but his loved ones know. 

For God so loved the world, 

That he gave his only-begotten Son, 

That whosoever believeth on him 
Should not perish, but have 
Everlasting life. 

THE PROJECTION OF IT 

And, blessed be God, the God of my life, 
if the spirit of the training of the early 
years is, after all, the same with the spirit 
that is to mark the later preaching career 
— and are we not forever endeavoring to 
raise it to that? — if, as we have been labor- 
ing to teach them, the training time is not 
only a preparation for life, but a part of 
life, then also the spirit of those later 
years, if we may only see and sustain it, 
will be of one piece still with the spirit and 
ideals of the training time. This would 
seem too simple and necessary for argu- 
ment or statement; but it will be a great 
day for the world's preaching service 
when in experience and in practice that 
relation shall look as good and work as 
4i 



well one way as the other, when, if youth- 
ful training and anticipation are held to be 
such as to develop no Quixotism which is 
to prove impossible in the later years, like- 
wise the ministry of the mature years of a 
Christian preacher shall not be permitted 
to sag into a pot-bellied pessimism which 
shall jaundice the promise of youth and 
belie the oath of his youthful allegiance. 

Let it not appear as a heathen and reck- 
less thing when it is declared to be the 
bottom conviction of the soul of a joyous 
preacher of Christ that he is not merely a 
Christ of the past, save in that mystic 
sense which is almost infinitely above our 
imaginations to conceive. Of course we 
all know that in an unspeakable way he 
gave all of himself up on the Cross. But 
it will be conceived also that the best of 
him and the most of him was not on that 
Cross. The rough Roman billet could not 
contain him. And as for his death, it was 
impossible that he should be holden of it. 
There is one thing better even than the 
Cross of Christ, and that is the Christ of 
the Cross. And this living Christ of the 
unforgettable Cross remains the only suf- 
42 



ficient sustaining factor in the training of 
the young Christian preaching-man. For 
the only decent basis for Christian 
preaching is Christian experience ; and the 
only experience that can be adequate must 
be an experience which will grow and 
project over the livelong career, expand- 
ing with and to all the issues that can 
ever leap to light. 

The young fireman wants to know — and 
has he not a right to know? — what the 
prospect is for his becoming an engineer, 
and how many are to be the years in the 
grimy left-hand seat. If you do not think 
so, you have never ridden there with the 
arm of one of them bracing you as the 
mighty, leaping, hurtling thing shouldered 
its way down the land at sixty miles an 
hour. He is careful and full of present 
duty, knowing what depends on that ; but 
he lives and walks proudly and literally 
"w r aits on" his sweetheart, as she on him, 
in the willing patience of assured promo- 
tion. 

So Jesus takes common fishermen and 
transforms them to be masters of the mul- 
titudes of earth; enhances every man's 
43 



prospects in life v/hom he touches; gives 
every disciple an open door and a wider 
field; will not suffer the redeemed Gada- 
rene peasant to go with him on ship be- 
cause he would send him on an am- 
bassage to ten cities; cannot endure to 
pass a poor man in the aisle of the dim 
synagogue and see his withered hand, but 
he must have it stretched forth as whole 
as the other and turn him afield equipped 
against the coming harvest time. And 
the puzzle of the sectaries and doctors 
to this day has been to make out where 
the faith and asking came in. The pas- 
sion of Jesus for completeness again and 
again leaped the theological hiatus and 
bridged the tragic chasm. Little children 
were discovered in the rubbish of the 
world, their mothers apologizing for their 
being here and praying but the boon of a 
passing touch; and he lifted them up, 
making a cameo of heaven by framing 
them with his good arms for a whole life. 
Broken-hearted women were brought up 
from those slippery downward paths into 
which they had been thrust by the lechery 
of their brothers, and their penitent feet 
44 



set in the road to their Father's house. 
The silly prodigal, who thought he had 
lost all and more than all, as he drew 
homeward from his wanderings, was met 
with a welcome, for the ethical basis of 
which the most religious people on earth 
could not supply even the imagination. 
Desolate widows on the way to the tomb 
with their loved and lost, who would 
gladly have prayed to be laid in the grave 
beside their dead, v/ere met at the gates 
of despair and turned back having their 
sons restored out of his holy wrath 
against that robber of the fullness of the 
years. And they and we and all were 
taught, as in a cartoon, if only we would 
open our eyes and see it, that death, so 
far from being a rusty funnel through 
which the purple tides of life are swal- 
lowed up of the grave, is a flying tunnel 
wherethrough we pass to the pastures of 
the life more abundant. 

Now, it is going to require this perspec- 
tive of what the gospel is and of what it 
is to be to catch the imagination and sub- 
due the heart and enlist the allegiance of 
the preacher for to-day. It must be this 
45 



reach-and-lift-and-thrust of the life, which 
shall draw to itself the best of our youth 
once more. It is the supreme adventure 
of the soul of the preacher on the promo- 
tion of his Lord's cause and on promotion 
from his Lord's hand, the utter and glad 
risk that I shall find in Christ and in his 
Empire of All Goodness over the hearts 
and minds of men that which has haunted 
me from my boyhood's pillow, and in him, 
the Prince of it all, come up at last on the 
shining man I am to be. 

4 6 





LOST: 


J 


O H N 


WESLEY 


A 


Cartoon 


of 


a Sup 


reme 


Preacher 



II 



The Bible is the word of God in the words of men. 

—Frederick W. Robertson. 



II 



LOST: JOHN WESLEY 

A Cartoon of a Supreme Preacher 

^^HE lest man of the Wesleyan move- 
ill ment is John Wesley himself. 
^^ As, in the battle of the Wilderness, 
Stonewall Jackson was lost in the execu- 
tion of his own orders and, in the univer- 
sal tumult and gathering darkness, was 
slain by the guns of his own devoted men, 
so, in the wide clash of Methodism 
through the tangled world, the key to the 
field has been apparently misconceived, 
the issue obscured, the original orders 
mangled, and one of the most gifted, ver- 
satile, and devoted leaders whom the 
world has known has been lost sight of, 
misinterpreted, and all but slain at the 
hands of those who of all men ought to 
maintain his standard and project his spir- 
it even as they bear and boast his name. 

It is an astonishing thing that, whilst 
through all the past and passing quadren- 
niums Methodist preachers have been re- 
quired to read and annually to reexamine 
Wesley's "Sermons," Wesley's "Notes on 
4 49 



the New Testament," and other so-called 
Wesleyan standards — though it does not 
appear entirely ascertainable what these 
"standards" might be — yet hardly so much 
as a hint has been held forth to them of 
what is perhaps the most enthralling rec- 
ord in fiction or fact of heroic purpose, 
wide service, and high achievement this 
side of the Acts of the Apostles — namely, 
John Wesley's own Journal.* 

One does not cheerfully take the voice 
of reproach, but there is no way round 
the assertion, out of a somewhat wide 
and varied personal knowledge of these 
preachers, that not one in one hundred of 
them has even a faint acquaintance with 
this moving, speaking, teaching auto-ro- 
mance of his life, any single volume of 
which will avail more for every purpose 
that a preacher might have than all the 
sermons and notes the restless Wesley 
ever wrote, and all the innumerable 
"lives" of him since compiled, and all the 

*Since this was first published, John Wesley's 
Journal has been introduced into the course of 
study for certain Methodist preachers. 
50 



unavailing braggadocio of our shouting 
tongues. 

Furthermore, though it may seem 
strange to see in print what it is certain 
many have long felt, neither the Sermons 
nor the Notes of John Wesley are longer 
of any particular wonder or surpassing 
value as they are read. We may as well 
face and state the fact. They are little, 
if at all, read to-day outside our denomi- 
national constraint. To be sure, they 
ought to be and will be read by us, but 
not to the utter neglect of other and better 
matter from the same author. Numbers 
of inquiries have, without exception, 
evoked the truth that a mute feeling of 
their inadequacy has lain in the hearts of 
the brethren these years. And one fine 
fellow on his glorious circuit hit off the 
whole inward essence of the matter when 
he said he had often felt, though never 
uttered, a surprise that these proffered 
and required Wesleyana could ever have 
produced the effects of the Wesleyan 
awakening. There is the point precisely : 
they never did it. 

And what more deep and telltale mark 
5i 



do we want of the dreary and fatal em- 
phasis which we have set on doctrine over 
deed, on organization over human inter- 
est, on the theology of an experience over 
the experience itself, and on a handful of 
musty books and a mouthful of pious 
opinions over the chivalrous, brilliant, and 
steadfast life which stirred them into be- 
ing? 

It is true that Mr. Wesley himself at 
one period, in the absence of any more 
available criterion at the time, constituted 
certain works of his a test for eligibility 
to the trusteeship of property in the 
young societies. And it is fair to suppose 
that this was the beginning, as it may be 
the apology for that sort of thing among 
the people called Methodists. But, in the 
first place, it is not a question of trustees 
holding property. If so, let the trustees 
read them! In the next place, Mr. Wes- 
ley had before him no such life of spirit 
and example as he himself later afforded 
his followers. Furthermore, nobody can 
be conceived as farther than he from halt- 
ing at such a point. And, still further, if 
he did, he would be in error, and the glo- 
52 



rious thing about him was that no man 
would more gladly recognize and correct 
an error. 

Tues., 3. I crossed over to St. 
Neat's and had an hour's friendly 

conversation with Mrs. V . O 

that all men would sit loose to opin- 
ions ! That they would think and let 
think! I preached in the evening to 
a numerous congregation with much 
enlargement of spirit. — * 

In order to some more just knowledge 
of the real and the whole John Wesley, 
we may well review here out of his own 
personal Journal, rather than from his 
religious teachings alone, the life that he 
lived. And this may be best done, within 
these limits, by regarding that life from 
the several and various viewpoints which 
follow, and making sure that the whole 
story is told, as far as possible, in his own 
words. 

JOHN WESLEY AND THE WORLD ORDER 

And if this is talking in a large way, 
yet no mortal is exempt from the reality 

*A11 close-set matter here is in quotation from 
John Wesley's Journal, save at the end of all, where 
an older prophet speaks. 

53 



of the subtle relationship that lies back 
of the talk. Helen Keller, blind, deaf, and 
dumb, puts it in a fascinating book, "The 
World I Live In," and makes her world 
ever larger. But do we not all make unto 
ourselves some such volume also, written 
or unwritten, larger or smaller? 

Not to go back to his large-minded sire 
nor to recall the marvelous mother nor 
trace the ways of the other eighteen chil- 
dren, it stands out patent and all-potent 
that young Jackie Wesley — for it is good 
to feel that he was once just that — al- 
though he never got to weigh more than 
one hundred and twenty-two pounds, 
came into his British mystic land-and-sea- 
and-sky order something alive all over, 
built like a Switzerland watch, with deli- 
cate fiber of truth-telling steel, a face no- 
bly compassing the full round message of 
his times, and a spring and ring of inward 
poise and health which more than fifty 
years of all-but-unparalleled effort and 
hardship could only make better. And 
our gusto of eugenics and theories of pre- 
natal preparedness were anticipated a 
century by the assembling of this man. — 
54 



I preached at five at Gwennap on a 
little hill. It rained from the time I 
began to the time I concluded. I felt 
no pain while I spoke, but the instant 
I had done and all the time I was with 
the Society my teeth and head ached 
so violently that I hardly had any 
senses. I lay down as soon as I 
could and fell asleep. In the morning 
(blessed be God ! ) I ailed nothing. 

He was mobbed a score of times and 
half as often in immediate jeopardy of his 
life, but was rarely touched and never 
once received an injury that he was will- 
ing to call serious. Kept out all of a wet 
night by a rabble who marched him across 
country from place to place and tried to 
trip in order to finish him, though others 
slid and fell, he neither slipped nor stum- 
bled, and came off with not a scratch on 
his body nor a ruffle in his temper. After 
a smashing, long drive to reach an ap- 
pointment (and the records show not 
more than three missed in the course of 
his life, though many were made without 
his knowledge and to his great inconveni- 
ence), he would dismount or "step out and 
preach immediately" without eating. — 
55 



[In a mob] from the beginning to 
the end I found the same presence of 
mind as if I had been sitting in my 
own study, but I took no thought for 
one moment before another. Only 
once it came into my mind that if 
they should throw me into the river 
it would spoil the papers that were 
in my pocket. For myself, I did not 
doubt but I should swim across, hav- 
ing but a thin coat and a light pair of 
boots. 

Many a rough journey I have had, 
but one like this I never had between 
wind and hail and rain and ice and 
snow and driving sleet and piercing 
cold. Our horses several times fell 
down while we were leading them. 
But it is passed. Those days will re- 
turn no more and are, therefore, as 
though they had never been. 

Pain, disappointment, sickness, strife, 
Whate'er molests or troubles life, 
However grievous in its stay, 
It shakes the tenement of clay; 
When past, as nothing we estern; 
And pain, like pleasure, is a dream. 

We agreed it would prevent great 
expense, as well of health as of time 
and money, if we should leave off 
drinking of tea. I expected some dif- 
ficulty in breaking off a custom of six 

56 



and twenty years' standing; and, ac- 
cordingly, the three first days my 
head ached more or less all day long, 
and I was half asleep from morning 
to night. The third day my memory 
failed almost entirely. In the evening 
I sought my remedy in prayer. On 
Thursday morning my headache was 
gone. My memory was as strong as 
ever; and I have found no inconven- 
ience, but a sensible benefit in several 
respects, from that very day to this. 

I walked over to Burnham. I had 
no thought of preaching there, doubt- 
ing if my strength would allow of 
preaching always thrice a day. But, 
finding a house full of people, I could 
not refrain. Still, the more I use my 
strength, the more I have. I am often 
much tired the first time I preach in a 
day, a little the second time, but after 
the third or fourth I rarely feel either 
weakness or weariness. 

In the evening we went to Lymp- 
sham, but not without some [ ! ] diffi- 
culty. The waters were out. . . . 
My horse got in over his back in 
water, nor could I get my lodgings 
the foot way till an honest man took 
me on his shoulders and so waded 
through. 

57 



I was faint and feverish when I 
began ; but staying an hour in a cold 
bath (for the wind was very high and 
sharp) quite refreshed me, so that all 
my faintness was gone, and I was 
perfectly well. 

I preached at eight, ... at elev- 
en, . . . and at five in the after- 
noon. I lodged at a gentleman's, who 
showed me a flower which he called a 
gummy cystus. It blooms in the 
morning with a large, beautiful snow- 
white flower. But every flower dies 
in the evening. 

I had a visit from Mr. B , grown 

an old, feeble, decrepit man! Hardly 
able to face a puff of wind or to creep 
up and down stairs ! Such is the fruit 
of cooping one's self in a house and 
sitting still day after day. 

At five in the evening I preached in 

the natural amphitheater at G . 

I think this is the most magnificent 
spectacle which is to be seen on this 
side heaven, fit held thirty thousand 
listeners, and his voice was distinctly 
heard by all.] And no music is to be 
heard upon earth comparable to their 
singing. 

O what a dull thing is life without 
religion! I do not wonder that time 

58 



hangs heavy on the hands of all who 
know not God, unless they are per- 
petually drunk with noise and hurry 
of one kind or another. 

The piano wires will receive and record 
more of what is doing about them than a 
wooden table. The Marconi wireless out- 
fit and the modern telescope will gather 
and register more of the pageant of sea 
and sky than a broken bottle. And Mr. 
Wesley observed, penetrated, analyzed, 
and absorbed the pulse and hidden in- 
wardness of the world order in which he 
was, in which we all are, immersed. 

No flower nor animal nor work nor man 
nor thing escaped him. He had an avidity 
and a sensibility like Shakespeare in its 
wide-openness to men and truth of all 
kinds and times, the difference apparently 
lying in the fact that, while Shakespeare 
had a genius for men as they were, Wes- 
ley had a genius for men as they were to 
be. If Shakespeare was the myriad- 
minded man, Wesley was the God-minded 
man. 

His physical, natural, social, literary, 
political, and philosophical observations 
59 



and criticisms alone would, if extracted 
from his Journal, constitute a volume of 
the most astute scientific interest, not 
always accurate by the test of present 
knowledge, a few times far from it, but 
awake, poised, luminous, fearlessly vera- 
cious, and, in the sum total of it, in con- 
sideration of his other activities, altogeth- 
er astonishing. — 

We walked from thence to Coal- 
brook-Dale and took a view of the 
bridge which is shortly to be thrown 
over the Severn. It is one arch, a 
hundred feet broad, fifty-two feet 
high, and eighteen wide, weighing 
many hundred tons. I doubt if the 
Colossus of Rhodes weighed much 
more. 

I preached at Winchester, where I 
went with great expectation to see 
that celebrated painting in the cathe- 
dral, "The Raising of Lazarus." But 
I was disappointed. I observed: i. 
There was such a huddle of figures 
that, had I not been told, I should not 
ever have guessed what they meant. 
2. The colors in general were far too 
glaring, such as neither Christ nor his 
followers ever wore. 
60 



Being at Osmotherley, seven miles 
from the cliffs, on Monday, and find- 
ing Edward Abbott there, I desired 
him the next morning to show me the 
way thither [the scene of a recent 
earthquake]. I walked, crept, and 
climbed round and over a great part 
of the ruins. One part of the solid 
stone is cleft from the rest in a per- 
pendicular line and smooth as if cut 
with diamonds. [And so forth for 
three pages of minute, discriminat- 
ing analysis and attempt at scientific 
explanation.] 

I went to Birmingham. I was sur- 
prised to hear that a good deal of 
platina was used there; but upon in- 
quiry I found it was not the true plat- 
ina, an original metal between gold 
and silver (being in weight nearest to 
gold, even as 18 to 19), but a mere 
compound of brass and spelter. 

. . . Mr. Hoare's gardens at 
Stourton. I have seen the most cele- 
brated gardens of England and Eu- 
rope, but these far exceed them all: 
1. In situation. ... 2. In the vast 
basin of water. ... 3. In the de- 
lightful interchange of shady groves 
and sunny glades; above all, in the 
grottoes. ... On one side is a lit- 
61 



tie hermitage, with a lamp, a chair, a 
table with bones upon it. Others 
were delighted with the temples, but 
I was not: i. Because several of the 
statues were mean. 2. Because I can- 
not admire the images of devils. 3. 
Because I defy all mankind to recon- 
cile statues of the nude, either to com- 
mon sense or to common decency. 

From Dr. Franklin's letters I 
learned: 1. That electrical fire (or 
aether) is a species of fire infinitely 
finer than any yet known. 2. That it 
is diffused and in nearly equal propor- 
tions through almost all substances. 
3. That as long as it is thus diffused 
it has no discernible effect. 4. That if 
any quantity of it be collected togeth- 
er, whether by art or nature, it then 
becomes visible in the form of fire and 
inexpressibly powerful. 5. That it is 
essentially different from the light of 
the sun; for it pervades a thousand 
bodies which light cannot penetrate 
and yet cannot penetrate glass, which 
light pervades so freely. 6. That 
lightning is no other than electrical 
fire collected by one or more clouds. 
7. That all the effects of lightning 
may be performed by the artificial 
electric fire. 8. That anything point- 
62 



ed, as a spire or a tree, attracts the 
lightning, just as a needle does the 
electric fire. 9. That the electrical 
fire discharged on a rat or fowl will 
kill it instantly, but discharged on 
one dipped in water will slide off and 
do it no hurt at all. In like manner 
lightning, which will kill a man in a 
moment, will not hurt him if he be 
thoroughly wet. What an amazing 
scene is here opened for after ages to 
improve upon ! 

Between Northampton and Tow- 
cester we met with a great natural 
curiosity, the largest elm I ever saw. 
It was twenty-eight feet in circum- 
ference, six feet more than that which 
was some years ago in Magdalen Col- 
lege walks at Oxford. 

I heard "Judith," an oratorio, per- 
formed at the Lock. Some parts of it 
were exceeding fine. 

To-day "Douglas," the play which 
has made so much noise, was put in 
my hands. I was astonished to find 
it is one of the finest tragedies I ever 
read. 

I saw the Westminster scholars act 
the "Adelphi of Terrence." O how 

63 



these heathens shame us ! Their very 
comedies contain both excellent sense, 
the liveliest pictures of men and man- 
ners, and so fine strokes of morality 
as are seldom found in the writings of 
Christians. 

Easter Day, Apr. 7. After preach- 
ing I went to the New Church and 
found an uncommon blessing at a 
time when I least of all expected it— 
namely, while the organist was play- 
ing a voluntary. 

I was desired to take a ride to the 
celebrated Giant's Causeway. It lies 
eleven English miles from Coleraine* 
. . . doubtless the effect of some 
subterraneous fire. Just such pillars 
and pumices are found in every coun- 
try which is or ever was subject to 
volcanoes. 

Hence we went to Land's End. . . . 
I clambered down the rocks to the 
edge of the water, and I cannot think 
but that the sea has gained some hun- 
dred yards since I was here forty 
years ago. [He was now eighty- 
three years of age.] 

In this journey I observed a mis- 
take that almost universally prevails, 

64 



and I desire all travelers to take good 
notice of it. Near thirty years ago I 
was thinking, "How is it that no 
horse ever stumbles while I am read- 
ing?" [History, poetry, and philoso- 
phy he commonly read on horseback.] 
No account can possibly be given but 
this, that I then throw the reins on 
his neck. I then set myself to ob- 
serve, and I aver that in riding above 
a hundred thousand miles horseback 
I scarce ever remember any horse ex- 
cept two (that would fall head over 
heels anyway) to fall or make consid- 
erable stumble while I rode with 
slack rein. To fancy, therefore, that 
a tight rein prevents stumbling is a 
capital blunder. A slack rein will 
prevent stumbling if anything will, 
but in some horses nothing can. 

I met with Pern's "Treatise on the 
Gravel and Stone." I had long sup- 
posed that there could not be in na- 
ture such thing as a medicine that 
could dissolve the stone without dis- 
solving the bladder. 

I spent two or three hours in the 
House of Lords. I had frequently 
heard that this was the most venera- 
ble assembly in England. But how 
5 65 



was I disappointed! What is a lord 
but a sinner appointed to die? 

It is out of all question even to name 
here the books reviewed, the music and 
art criticized, the phenomena analyzed, 
the stories of life — humor and tragedy, the 
behavior of men and animals — recorded, 
with natural objects observed. 

Now, in a certain old and excellent 
Record it is written that a certain man 
said, "I will now turn aside and see this 
wonderful sight," and that, when God 
saw that he did turn aside to see, he called 
to him. And history has not been the 
same thing since that day. 

Let us honestly ask, Is our preaching 
impoverished? Is our ministry dull and 
unalluring, not even worldly in the sense 
in which it ought to be worldly, that is 
to say, in having some contact and con- 
cern and masterful experience of it? And 
how much of all this has been and yet 
remains lost to us in the little of Wesley 
we have known? And without it what 
can the pious professionalism of our anae- 
mic foothold and half-inch outlook in 
God's world avail? 

66 



JOHN WESLEY AHORSE 

There are people who are said to be 
handsome only as they are in motion. 
And John Wesley's attractiveness and in- 
fluence in the world, notwithstanding his 
impressive personal appearance, are im- 
possible to account for apart from the un- 
rivaled extent, variety, and incessancy of 
his travels. It was Mr. Wesley in the 
way, all his long life on those surprising, 
tireless journeys, that came at first to 
bewilder the eyes and at length to bewitch 
the hearts of the people of the British 
Isles. His continual passage up and down 
and throughout the whole country, from 
city to hamlet, from hamlet to sea, always 
with a book before him, his grasp of steel 
on the present duty, his face and voice 
upward lifted ever to the full possibilities 
of life as it ought to be — namely, at its 
best — gave to his personality the quality 
of living water. Such lives are of no com- 
position, merely, of two parts of hydro- 
gen with one of oxygen, together with 
whatever else may have been dumped or 
leaked in upon it. They spring and sing 
and gleam and live. The heart of the 
67 



race claps its hands by such a stream, and 
its deepest soul is refreshed. 

It has been a favorite saying of one of 
Wesley's eminent followers in recent 
years that a man in his mental life has 
for his capital not only what he possesses 
of stored-up learning at any given time, 
but the energy of that which he is now 
learning also. That is to say, there is 
a power which makes for efficiency in the 
mind at work. The deep solace of that 
truth may well be extended to apply be- 
yond the mental faculty to all there is of 
a man. It is not onty, often it is not so 
much, where a man has been as how late- 
ly he has come and where or which way 
he is going and how soon he may be ex- 
pected to arrive. It is not alone what a 
man has confessed or prayed or ventured, 
but what he has brewing and is about to 
realize in tongue or soul or feet at the 
present hour, which smites imperiously 
the droning attention of the inhabitants. 
Wherefore it was this kinetic, never stat- 
ic Mr. Wesley who grew to such a vol- 
ume of interest and power amongst his 
people. 

68 



After a few years of this travel, the 
apostolic name and face and voice came 
to have little or no need of any appoint- 
ment previous to his coming. The multi- 
tudes by the thousands ran together at the 
first report of his approach or upon the 
first note of his hymn striking up by the 
table in the street or beneath the tree on 
the hill. They were, to be sure, not dis- 
appointed in him when they came. No 
man without a tremendous message could 
have held or dealt with the throngs that 
came. But it was beyond all question 
also, and first, that the most of them 
would never have heard what he had to 
say had he not come in the way he did, 
and had he not kept coming and — going. 
Times without number Mr. Wesley re- 
cites the striking excellence of the ser- 
mons he hears by clergymen of the Estab- 
lished Church, his unvarying and lifelong 
practice being to attend its worship and 
never to preach or hold any meeting what- 
ever that would conflict with its exercises. 
But everywhere, as we know, these were 
delivering their messages to empty bench- 
es, while in his unhalting itinerancy he 
69 



literally took the people off guard, and 
they came to expect to be surprised — and 
to love it. — 

We crossed over the enormous 
mountain into lovely Wenandale. 
. . . As I rode through the town 
the people stood staring on every 
side as if we had been a company of 
monsters. I preached in the street; 
and they soon ran together, young 
and old, from every quarter. I re- 
minded the elder of their having seen 
me there thirty years before, when I 
preached in Wensley Church, and I 
enforced once more, "Believe in the 
Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be 
saved." When I rode back through 
the town, it wore a new face. The 
people were bowing and curtsying 
on every side. Such a change in two 
hours I have seldom seen. 

It is a haunting question what these 
easy Pullmans and luxurious hotels and 
episcopal summer resorts and pompous 
personal attentions of the Church of Wes- 
ley after a century and a half would do 
for Mr. Wesley himself or he for them. 
Why, when a bishop coming in from the 
Philippine Islands chose to get mixed up 
70 



with his fellow travelers in the steerage 
the other day, the spectacle was rare news 
and got on the telegraphic nerves of the 
country. An additional piece of news 
was that it was an Episcopal bishop. 
VoiJa! What a reversal! 

The most strenuous and physically ac- 
complished man in the world's public life, 
when President of the United States not 
long since, drew the admiring or com- 
plaining attention of the nation by riding 
ninety-eight miles in one day as a military 
feat on perfect roads in perfect weather, 
with picked horses awaiting him in easy 
relay. John Wesley on innumerable jour- 
neys rode fifty, seventy, and ninety miles, 
preaching from two to four times a day, 
over any and sometimes horrible roads, 
with what mounts and accoutrement he 
might command, through storms that 
made his horses reel and suns that smote 
fever to the bone, and this at a weight of 
a hundred and twenty-odd pounds. Once 
it was one hundred and ten miles; and 
again, from Wednesday to Friday after- 
noon, it was from Congleton to Bristol 
and return, a total distance of two hun- 
7i 



dred and eighty miles, in two days and 
nights and "feeling no more tired (blessed 
be God!) on my return than when I left." 
Nor were these journeys simply athletic 
feats or isolated episodes or varied and 
happy changes of exercise. They were 
wholly incidental and habitual till his life 
had reached a length of more than eighty 
years, when his Journal recites that for 
more than fifty years he had traveled, by 
land or sea, horseback, coach, chaise, or 
foot, a yearly distance of forty-five hun- 
dred miles — which is an average of twelve 
miles every day for more than half a cen- 
tury. 

Now, what can all this physical move- 
ment have to do with the high and holy 
matter of religion, or with the recovery of 
a lost power in the ministry of his more 
recent "assistants"? Much every way. 
His own laborious Journal is crowded 
with the record of such physical efficiency 
and expenditure. But not one intimation 
of it all is given in the Wesleyan master- 
pieces we have been called on to read. 
Many — if the truth may be told, one hun- 
dred to one — of us have pored over Wes- 
72 



ley's "sacred" writings as selected for us 
by the authorities, or inflated the pride or 
chastened the sorrows of our ministry 
with his great name, and have given no 
recognition whatever to the splendid, ir- 
repressible physical mechanism he had — 
and used. 

The Orient-born, far-traveled Bishop 
Lambuth said one day that the brains of 
the country was going into business. Dr. 
John Watson (Ian Maclaren) told the 
young Yale preacher-men that no robust 
gospel need be expected of men with fee- 
ble and undeveloped bodies. And a beau- 
tiful young woman, who should have 
known, since she was the daughter of a 
church magnate, was saying the other 
day, after witnessing the physique of the 
classes received into an annual confer- 
ence, that she saw nothing to turn a young 
girl's head at the prospect of becoming 
the wife of a Methodist preacher. Where 
in all the test and type of our present-day 
Wesleyanism is the lost spirit of the puis- 
sant, virile, irrepressible John Wesley 
himself? — 

73 



Friday, 19th, came a message from 
Jo. Magor, dangerously ill at Sid- 
mouth, four or five and twenty miles 
off, to tell me he could not die in 
peace till he had seen me. So the 
next morning, after preaching, I set 
out, spent an hour with him, by which 
he was exceedingly refreshed, and re- 
turned to Tiverton time enough to 
rest a little before the evening preach- 
ing. 

I preached at Swansea at five, in 
Neath between eight and nine, and 
about one at Margum. Between this 
and Bridge-End we had the hardest 
rain I remember ever to have seen in 
Europe. . . . We were wet to the 
toes. In the evening I preached in 
Old Castle. 

About eight I was so tired I could 
hardly stand. But after speaking an- 
other hour at G , I was as lively 

and strong as at eight in the morning. 

I rested ( ! ) the four following days, 
preaching only morning and evening. 
In the intervals of my time I com- 
piled an Irish grammar. 

I left Leeds in one of the roughest 
mornings I have ever seen. Our 
hands bled. The cold had an effect I 

74 



never felt before. It made me down- 
right sick. About nine I preached at 
Bramley; between one and two at 
Pudsey. Afterwards I walked to Ful- 
neck, the German settlement. 

We took horse at four. It was sev- 
enty miles to a friend's house, where 
I preached at three in the afternoon; 
and, procuring a fresh horse about 
the size of an ass, I rode on with 
more ease than state to Aghrim. 

I preached abroad at five. Again 
at Black-Burton at eleven. Thence 
we rode to Long-Preston. Hence I 
rode to Skipton and preached in the 
evening near the bridge. Nor did I 
feel any weariness after preaching 
four times and riding fifty miles. 

I took horse a little after four and 
about two preached in the market 
house at Lanidloes, two or three and 
forty miles distant. At three we rode 
forward through the mountains to 

F . . . . We came back to the 

mountain again about seven P.M. 
After riding an hour, we found we 
were quite out of the way. We were 
then told to ride back the same way, 
but our path soon ended in the ed??e 
of a bog. . . . We turned and rode 
on to where we inquired again (it 

75 



being a little past nine) and were 
once more set exactly wrong. And, 
having wandered an hour on the 
mountains, through rocks and bogs 
and precipices, . . . between elev- 
en and twelve we came to the inn 
[eighteen hours in the saddle]. 

Wed., 12, I took coach. The next 
day we reached Grantham, and Lon- 
don about seven on Friday evening, 
having run that day a hundred and 
ten miles. On the road I read over 
Seller's "History of Palmyra" and 
Norden's "Travels into Egypt and 
Abyssinia." 

Friday, 13th, after preaching at 
Road, Pensford, Trowbridge, and 
Freshford, I preached at Bath. 

Sun., 12. Dr. Coke read prayers, 
and I preached in the New Room. 
Afterwards I hastened to Kingswood 
and preached under the shade of that 
double row of trees which I had 
planted forty years ago. 

Mon., 13. I visited one confined to 
her bed and in much pain, but un- 
speakably happy. 

Fri., 17. The house would not con- 
tain half the people. Again about 
eleven I preached at Caste-Cary and 
76 



in the evening at Shepton-Mallat. 
[And all this at eighty-one years of 
age!] 

JOHN WESLEY THE PASTOR AND SOCIAL WORKER 

Whether preaching to the crowded 
thousands, poring over his studies, fight- 
ing his way in the teeth of a North Ire- 
land blizzard, or examining the state of 
one of the ever-multiplying societies, 
there was a compact solidity and balance 
in all his work. In Wesley's mind there 
v/as no hitch nor lost motion of fad prac- 
tice. He literally went about doing good 
and, by the ultimate apology of well- 
doing, stopped the mouth of opposition. 
His sermons were only his life making 
itself vocal ; his pastoral and social service 
was but his golden message substantiat- 
ing itself ; and the passage from the one to 
the other was but the open door of oppor- 
tunity. — 

Sun., 13. I went in the morning in 
order to speak severally with the 
members of the Society at Tanfield. 
From the terrible instances I met 
with here, I am more and more con- 
vinced that the Devil himself desires 

77 



nothing more than this, that the peo- 
ple of any place should be half awak- 
ened and then left to themselves to 
fall asleep again. Therefore I deter- 
mined, by the grace of God, not to 
strike one stroke in any place where I 
cannot follow the blow. 

Thur., 25. I was more convinced 
than ever that the preaching like an 
apostle, without joining together 
those that are awakened and training 
them up in the ways of God, is only 
begetting children for the murderer. 

Let us rather [in giving account of 
our work] speak under than above 
the truth. We of all men should be 
punctual in all we say, that none of 
our words may fall to the ground. 

Wed., 21. I visited more of the 
poor sick. The industry of many of 
them surprised me. Several who 
were ill able to walk were, neverthe- 
less, at work; some without any fire 
(bitterly cold it was) ; and some, I 
doubt, without any food, yet not 
without that "meat which endureth 
to everlasting life." 

Mon., 10. The four following days 
I wrote a catalogue of the Society, 
now reduced from eight and twenty 
78 



hundred to about two and twenty. 
Such is the fruit of George Bell's en- 
thusiasm [wildfire] and Thomas 
Maxfield's gratitude. 

Fri., August 2. We made our first 
subscription to the building a new 
chapel, and at this and the two fol- 
lowing meetings above a thousand 
pounds were cheerfully subscribed. 

Hon., 9. I began what I had long 
intended, visiting the Society from 
house to house, setting apart at least 
two hours in a day for that purpose. 
I was surprised to find the simplicity 
with which one and all spoke both of 
their temporal and spiritual state, nor 
could I easily have known by any 
other means how great a work God 
has wrought among them. 

Mon., iq. I began the unpleasing 
task of visiting the classes. I still 
continue to do this in London and 
Bristol and Cork and Dublin. With 
the other Societies their respective 
assistants supply my lack of service. 

Sun., 21. Returned to Norwich. I 
wish all our preachers would be ac- 
curate in their accounts and rather 
speak under than over the truth. I 
had heard again and again of the in- 

79 



crease of the Society, and what is the 
naked truth? Why, I left in it two 
hundred and two members, and I find 
one hundred and seventy-five. 

Tues., 4. ... So on this and the 
four following days I walked through 
the town and begged two hundred 
pounds [$1,000], in order to clothe 
them that wanted it most. But it 
was hard work, as most of the streets 
were filled with melting snow, which 
often lay ankle-deep, so that my feet 
were steeped in snow water nearly 
from morning till evening. 

• Tues., 8. At our dispensary . . . 
within the year about three hundred 
had received medicines occasionally, 
about one hundred regularly, and had 
submitted to a proper regimen. More 
than ninety were entirely cured of 
diseases they had long labored under. 

Our rule in the lending stock com- 
pany for the poor is, to lend only 
twenty shillings at once, which is re- 
paid weekly in three months. No 
less than two hundred and fifty per- 
sons have been relieved in eighteen 
months. [Doubtless as large a num- 
ber as in some of the most successful 
modern philanthropies of the kind.] 
80 



Mon., Dec. 5, and so the whole 
week, I spent every hour I could 
spare in the unpleasing but necessary 
work of going through the town and 
begging for the poor men who had 
been employed in finishing the New 
Chapel. It is true, I am not obliged 
to do this; but if I do not, nobody 
else will. [In London, over seventy 
years old.] 

Sun., 12. I preached morning and 
evening for our little Charity School, 
where forty boys and twenty girls are 
trained up both for this world and the 
world to come. 

The greatest charity is to awaken 
them that sleep in sin. 

JOHN WESLEY THE DOCTOR AND HEALER 

These facts stand out as clear as stars 
from the mists of the history of healing : 

1. The foundation of it all is as firm 
and open a grasp as possible of the facts 
of the laws of living, as these are written 
in nature and found in experience. No 
expert in modern hygiene and preventive 
medicine can for a moment surpass John 
Wesley in his recognition and practice of 
this fundamental truth. 
6 81 



2. There is, so far as any special or 
divine healing is concerned, no healing 
through prayer and tactual influence as a 
specialty. There was in Biblical days and 
since divine healing, but never a "divine 
healer." The cure comes down and off 
from the fullness and potency of a big 
life, as a by-product of what one may al- 
most say is another and even larger pur- 
pose. Jesus's cures all wear something of 
this appearance of the incidental. He is 
going somewhere, he has been speaking 
of the Father, and he has been showing 
forth life at its full— that is, in the Fa- 
ther. Somebody in the throng touches 
the border of his garment or calls suffer- 
ingly to him by the wayside, and virtue 
goes out of him. It was the same way 
with Peter when they declared that his 
very shadow falling on the sick could 
heal men, or when about the same time 
he and John were going up to teach in 
the temple through the gate called Beau- 
tiful. Life was at high tide. And so with 
St. Paul, it will be found, in every case. 
And so with John Wesley. And the sor- 
row and the reproach is that with us, their 
82 



followers, life has ebbed so low that, on 
one hand, ugly things like Eddyism, Dow- 
ieism, Russellism, and Yoakumism find 
their day and emerge; and, on the other, 
a brood of smug specialists and sani- 
tarians misconceive that there is no con- 
nection whatever between a healthy life 
and an honest and adequate view and goal 
of life. 

3. Absolute and unvarying absence of 
a money consideration. People are at 
least stupid historians who will send Pas- 
tor Yoakum five dollars and receive a 
handkerchief from his body. — 

Thur., 14. I read prayers and 
preached in Clutton Church; but it 
was with great difficulty, because of 
my hoarseness, which so increased 
that in four and twenty hours I could 
scarce speak at all. All night I 
used my never -failing remedy, 
bruised garlic applied to the soles of 
the feet. This cured my hoarseness 
in six hours, and in one hour it cured 
my lumbago, the pain in the small of 
my back which I had had ever since 
I came from Cornwall. 

Sat., 10. After traveling between 
83 



ninety and a hundred miles, I came 
back to Malton and, having rested an 
hour, went on to Scarborough and 
preached in the evening. But the 
flux, which I had had for a few days, 
so increased that at first I found it 
difficult to speak; yet the longer I 
spoke, the stronger I grew. Is not 
God a present help? 

Sun., ii. I experienced a second 
time what one calls febris ex insofar 
tione, The day was cold, but the sun 
shone warm on my back as I sat on 
the window. In less than half an 
hour I began to shiver and soon 
after had a strong fit of ague. I di- 
rectly lay down between blankets 
and drank largely of warm lemonade. 
In ten minutes the hot fit came on, 
and quickly after I fell asleep. Hav- 
ing slept half an hour, I rose up and 
preached. Afterwards I met the So- 
ciety; and I found no want of 
strength, but was just as well at the 
end as at the beginning. 

Wed., 4. I called on an honest man 
and, I hope, took him out of the 
hands of an egregious quack, who 
was pouring in medicines upon him 
for what he called "wind in the 
nerves" ! 

84 



In going to Lurgan I was again 
surprised to find that I could not fix 
my attention on what I read. . . . 
I sent for Dr. Laws, a sensible and 
skillful physician. He told me I was 
in a high fever and advised me to lay 
by. But I told him it could not be 
done, as I had appointed to preach at 
several places. He then prescribed a 
cooling draught with a grain or two 
of camphor, and my nerves were uni- 
versally agitated. This I took with 
me to Tandragee and Derry-Aghy. 
Here nature sank, and I took my bed. 
. . . I sent for Dr. McBride, who 
soon had me restored. If he keeps 
on in his present way, he will surely 
be among the most skilled physicians 
of Europe. 

Sat., 20. I advised one who had 
been troubled many years with a 
stubborn paralytic disorder to try a 
new remedy. Accordingly, she was 
electrified and found immediate help. 
By the same means I have known 
two persons cured of an inveterate 
pain in the stomach and another of a 
pain in his side which he had had 
ever since he was a child. Neverthe- 
less, who can wonder that many gen- 
tlemen of the faculty [profession], as 

85 



well as their good friends, the apothe- 
caries, decry a medicine so shockingly 
cheap and easy as much as they do 
quicksilver and tar water? 

Tues., 9. Having procured an ap- 
paratus on purpose, I ordered several 
persons to be electrified who were ill 
of various disorders, some of whom 
found an immediate, some a gradual, 
cure. From this time I appointed first 
some hours in every week, and after- 
wards an hour in every day, wherein 
we might try the virtue of this sur- 
prising medicine. Two or three years 
after our patients were so numerous 
that we were obliged to divide them, 
part at the Foundry, others at St. 
Paul's, the rest near the Seven Dials. 
And to this day, while hundreds, 
perhaps thousands, have received un- 
speakable good, I have not known 
one man, woman, or child who has 
received hurt thereby. 

Mon., 18. I found Mr. Greenwood 
(with whom I lodged) dying, as was 
supposed, of the gout in the stomach. 
But, on observing the symptoms, I 
was convinced it was not the gout, 
but the angina pectoris (well de- 
scribed by Dr. Heberden and still 
more accurately by Dr. McBride, of 
86 



Dublin). I therefore advised him to 
take no more medicines, but to be 
electrified through the breast. He 
was so. The violent symptoms im- 
mediately ceased, and he fell into a 
sweet sleep. 

Wed., 6. About one I heard a shrill 
voice in the street calling and desir- 
ing me to come to Mr. . I found 

him ill in body and in an agony of 
mind. He fully believed he was at 
the point of death, nor could any ar- 
guments convince him to the contra- 
ry. We cried to Him who has all 
power in heaven and earth and who 
keeps the keys of life and death. He 
soon started up in bed and said with 
a loud voice: "I shall not die, but 
live I* And so he did. 

Fri., 1 6. . . . Immediately a 
strange scene occurred. I was de- 
sired to visit one who had been emi- 
nently pious, but had now been con- 
fined to her bed several months and 
was utterly unable to raise herself up. 
She desired us to pray, that the chain 
might be broken. A few of us prayed 
in faith. Presently she rose up, 
dressed herself, came downstairs, 
and, I believe, had not any further 
complaint. In the evening I preached 

87 



at High- Wycombe and on Saturday 
returned to London. 

Sat., 12. Reflecting to-day on the 
case of a poor woman, who had a 
continual pain in her stomach, I could 
not but remark the inexcusable negli- 
gence of most physicians in cases of 
this nature. They prescribe drug 
upon drug without knowing a jot of 
the matter concerning the root of the 
disorder. . . . Whence came this 
woman's pain (which she would nev- 
er have told had she not been ques- 
tioned about it) ? From fretting for 
the death of her son. And what 
availed medicines while that fretting 
continued? Why, then, do not all 
physicians consider how far bodily 
disorders are caused or influenced by 
the mind and, in those cases which 
are utterly out of their sphere, call in 
the assistance of a minister, as min- 
isters, when they find the mind dis- 
ordered by the body, call in the as- 
sistance of a physician? [So antici- 
pated the Boston Emmanuel Insti- 
tute, and the like, near two hundred 
years.] 

Wed., 24. The floods kept me shut 
up at Longwood house ; but I got to 
Halifax, where I found Mr. Floyde 
88 



lay in a high fever, almost dead for 
want of sleep. This was prevented 
by violent pain in one of his feet, 
which was much swelled and so sore 
that it could not be touched. We 
joined in prayer that God would ful- 
fill his word and giv6 his beloved 
sleep. Presently the swelling, the 
soreness, the pain were gone, and he 
had a good night's rest. 

Tues., 31. At eleven I preached in 
the avenue again. It rained all the 
time. . . . Afterwards a decent 
woman, whom I never saw either be- 
fore or since, desired to speak with 
me and said: "I met you at Caledon. 
I had had then a violent pain in my 
head for four weeks, but was fully 
persuaded that I should be well if you 
would lay your hand on my cheek, 
which I begged you to do. From 
that moment I have been perfectly 
well.'' If so, give God the glory. 

JOHN WESLEY AND BOOKS 

If Wesley as a horseback rider took 
coach-ridden England by surprise — Wes- 
ley the reader, student, and writer would 
be an amazement even to this day of 
books. 

89 



The many-sided versatility of the man 
is not simply bewildering; it is entirely 
deceptive. It is not that he did so many 
things that one could not tell what he was 
doing save in the sequel of his undertak- 
ings. But the concentration and excel- 
lence were so intense and characteristic 
that whatever he undertook or happened 
to be engaged in was as though it were 
the only thing he did or could do. 

As a connoisseur of scenery, architec- 
ture, and the arts, whether music, sculp- 
ture, or painting; as a raconteur of the 
endless episode and revelation of animals 
and of human nature; as a student, a 
traveler, a writer, a rider, a debater, a 
house-to-house pastor, a peacemaker, an 
organizer, an uplifter, an upturner, a 
councilor, a speaker commanding as many 
as twenty thousand hearers at one time, 
doctor, financier earning and giving away 
some two hundred and fifty thousand 
dollars, patriot, and saint — not in a hodge- 
podge of general jack-at-all-goodness, but 
specifically and prolongedly — he excelled. 

As a preacher of intense, clear, unpad- 
ded exposition and application, he so 
90 



eliminated every other element and inter- 
est that it was as though he neither did 
nor knew anything else. How much of 
all his bigger, richer, fuller life, the head- 
waters of all his great preaching and in- 
fluence, do we apprehend in his printed 
Sermons or in anything which we have 
been required or accustomed to read? 
Nothing whatever. For any knowledge 
of this seeing, singing, preaching, humor- 
ous, suffering, radiant, red-blooded, lost 
John Wesley we would almost as well be 
reading an algebra. And so it comes 
about that a jostling, conference-attend- 
ing, personal-column-reading army of us 
Wesleyans are going up and down the 
land or sitting around the land who know 
no Wesley, men whose sources are little 
deeper or farther up than the surface 
waters of the foam and garbage of the 
daily papers, whose mental strength is 
little more than the driftings of the curb- 
stone philosophy of the town. Not in a 
few, but in many quarters, whether of 
city, country, or town, it is in bad taste 
and embarrassing even to speak of books. 
Nor shall I shrink from recording here 
9i 



the astonishment, discouragement, and 
humiliation which have been time and 
again the experience of thoughtful and 
loyal men in more than one annual con- 
ference through the cheap sophistry and 
coarse ridicule of some of our Methodist 
leaders putting their audiences, from pit 
to gallery, in gales of unctuous mirth at 
the expense of any claim or need of a life 
and ministry of sanctified learning. 

This "Mr. W " of ours, as he desig- 
nates himself through the pages of the 
Journal — for his mind was so engrossed 
and fed with the myriad of other interests 
that he neither found the time nor nursed 
the care to have his name spelled out in 
print — was a man of books. Nay, but 
throughout the length of his fourscore 
years (how he did it with all the other 
defies analysis!) he fingered, loved, read, 
knew books, and bore about a mind well- 
ing with the inspiration and consecrated 
power of their contents, and started in 
their dusty beds the watercourses of a 
new intellectual and spiritual life in Eng- 
land and the world. Time will afford no 
space for even the briefest mention of 
92 



those books he read and, in the privacy of 
a Journal which was never meant for the 
public eye, criticized and reviewed. More- 
over, so far from being confined to works 
which, when we are talking through our 
noses, we call "sacred literature," here is 
everything which the alphabet will hold, 
from Ariosto's "Orlando Furioso" and "A 
Chinese Fragment" and "A Creed of Com- 
mon Sense" to Swedenborg's "Heaven 
and Hell," Wilson's "Treatise on the Cir- 
culation of the Blood," and Xenophon's 
"Memorabilia of Socrates." 

But we shall be under the necessity of 
confining the list, even of those named, 
solely to some, not all, of the volumes 
mastered on horseback and in coach. 
"History, poetry, philosophy," the Jour- 
nal recites, "I commonly read on horse- 
back, having other employment at other 
times." — 

On the way to Canterbury I read 
Mr. Baxter's "History of the [Church] 
Councils." What a company of 
wretches, perpetually cursing one an- 
other! ... In riding from Man- 
chester to Bolton I read the "Life of 

93 



Theodore, King of Corsica." In rid- 
ing to Rosmead I read Sir John Da- 
vies's "History of Ireland." I took 
coach for London. On the way I 
read over Seller's "History of Palmy- 
ra" and Norden's "Travels into Egypt 
and Abyssinia." On the road to bath 
I read Dr. Campbell's "Answer to 
David Hume on Miracles" and Dr. 
Brown's keen "Animadversions on 
the Characteristics of Lord Shaftes- 
bury." In my fragments of time I 
read Dr. Priestley's book on "Elec- 
tricity." In the coach going and 
coming I read several volumes of 
Mr. Guthrie's "History of Scotland." 
Last week I read over, as I rode, a 
great part of Homer's "Odyssey." In 
a little journey, etc., I finished Dr. 
Burnet's "Theory of the Earth," . . . 
Tasso's "Jerusalem Delivered," Mr. 
Hooks's "Roman History," "A Senti- 
mental Journey through France and 
Italy," "History of America," "On 
the Slave Trade," "History of Charles 
the Fifth," Dr. Byrom's "Poems," 
Dr. Lee's "Sophron," Lord Herbert's 
"Life," Lord K.'s "Essays on Moral- 
ity and Religion," Dr. Swift's "Let- 
ters," a volume of Latin "Poems," 
that elegant trifle, "The Correspond- 
ence between Theodosia and Con- 

94 



stantia," Mr. Boehm's "Sermons," 
Lucian's "Dialogues," the "Iliad," 
"Affairs in the East Indies," Gray's 
"Poems," Dr. McBride's "Practice of 
Physic," Voltaire's "Memoirs," Lord 
Bacon's "Ten Centuries of Experi- 
ments," Huygen's "Conjectures on 
the Planetary Worlds," etc., etc., etc. 

This week I endeavored to point 
out all the errata in the eight volumes 
of the Arminian Magazine [now the 
Wesleyan Methodist Magazine, Lon- 
don]. 

I began to execute a design, long 
in my thoughts, to print an accurate 
edition of my works [including a sys- 
tem of natural philosophy, transla- 
tions of books from French and Ger- 
man, essays, tracts, books and ser- 
mons on medicine, music, electricity, 
statecraft, theology, in all some two 
hundred and thirty-three volumes, 
besides one hundred edited or com- 
piled and thirty shared with his 
brother, and besides the Magazine 
and the Journal, the latter alone be- 
ing a bigger product than many emi- 
nent literary men accomplish.] 

Conceive this avid, all-searching, all- 
serving man, whose modesty we have 
95 



turned into brag, whose deeds we have 
forgotten or never known, whose spirit 
we have lost, and whose name we have 
worn slick — conceive of what he would 
say about the laziness and ignorance of 
many of us who are ministers to-day in 
the Church he founded and fathered — and 
what he would do. 

JOHN WESLEY AND— GOD 

Here was the supreme objective of all 
the countless journeys, the inspiration of 
the wonderful health, the motif of the 
amazing energy, the shining torch to the 
insatiable studies, the je ne sais quoi (to 
employ a favorite French expression of 
his own) of his strange engagingness and 
deathless zest in life. 

If he was a peerless rider, that was 
purely incidental, and he rode to the great 
goals of God. If he was ever a student, it 
was that he might know him and the 
power of his resurrection and the fellow- 
ship of his sufferings. If he was a states- 
man, whom historians have accredited 
with saving England from revolution and 
Europe from a return to medieval dark- 
96 



ness, it was because he saw and sought 
first His kingdom and His righteousness. 
The first of all his hundreds of publica- 
tions was a volume of daily prayers. And 
the last exultant cry of his great heart 
was : "The best of all is, God is with us !" 
This is the virile, life-engulfing, world- 
transforming, personal holiness of John 
Wesley. The holiness of a theology 
alone, though he had a theology, and the 
holiness of tradition alone, though his 
attitude to tradition was ever conserva- 
tive, can have little to do with it. The 
holiness of the "Sermons" and the 
"Notes" of the annual conference exam- 
ination rooms have not been able to 
sweeten one conference session nor to 
impel our solemnly resounding resolu- 
tions through the first quarter of any 
succeeding year. It is not there. We 
would as well be making ornaments of 
the saddles he rode. If the pride of an 
empty professionalism and the vanity of 
an impotent self-seeking and the childish 
hull-gull of a useless and half-observed 
secrecy have at times befallen us; if we 
have come to a time when we can hardly 
7 97 



do our work for looking to the next an- 
nual conference ; if, when we arrive there, 
we find the assembly divided into three 
equal parts, one-third knowing by special 
faculty or favor the appointments they are 
to receive, another third whispering and 
running and writhing in uncertainty, and 
the rest standing off and playing the 
game as it is pretended to be played ; and 
if in the purest and most vital form of 
Wesleyan Methodism in the world, in 
England, there is no such thing as this 
un-American, un- Wesleyan secret cabi- 
net — if these are the afflicting facts of 
Methodism, then no holiness nor sys- 
tem nor name whatever shall avail to cure 
them, save that which as a living virtue 
comes forth from a life big with a higher 
purpose and with an efficiency which the 
world can use. 

Winston Churchill, in his acute, spirit- 
ual story, "The Inside of the Cup," empha- 
sizes "that profound and elemental truth, 
that the world grows better, not by or- 
ganized, soul-saving machinery, but by 
personality." As for John Wesley, he 
98 



cries out in his Journal : "I spoke to them 
with all the authority of love !" — 

. . . Call me Jew, Turk, infidel; 
but do not call me bishop. 

Sun., 10. I began reading and ex- 
plaining to the Society the Large 
Minutes of the Conference. I desire 
to do all things openly and above 
board. I would have all the world, 
and especially all of our Societies, see 
not only all the steps we take, but the 
reasons why we take them. 

Wed., 29. I returned to Cork and 
met the classes. O, when will even 
the Methodists learn not to exagger- 
ate? After all the pompous accounts 
I had had of the vast increase of the 
Society, it is not increased at all — 
nay, it is a little smaller than it was 
three years ago. And yet many of 
the members are alive to God. But 
the smiling world hangs heavily upon 
them. 

As none of them thought of unhar- 
nessing the horses, the traces were 
soon broke. At length they fastened 
ropes to the chaise and to the strong- 
er horse; and, the horse pulling and 
the men thrusting at once, they thrust 
it through the slough to the firm land. 

99 



. . . While I was walking a poor 
man overtook me who appeared to be 
in deep distress. He said he owed his 
landlord twenty shillings rent, for 
which he had turned him and his 
family out of doors; and that he had 
been down with his relations to beg 
their help, but they would do noth- 
ing. Upon my giving him a guinea, 
he would needs kneel down in the 
road to pray for me and then cried 
out : "O, I shall have a house ! I shall 
have a house over my head!" So 
perhaps God answered that poor 
man's prayer by the sticking of the 
chaise in the slough ! 

Wed., 28. Finding the unaccounta- 
ble apprehension of I know not what 
danger, which had been upon me sev- 
eral days, increase, I cried earnestly 
for help ; and it pleased God in a mo- 
ment to restore peace to my soul. 
Let me observe hereon: 1. That not 
one of these hours ought to pass out 
of my remembrance till I attain an- 
other manner of spirit, a spirit equal- 
ly willing to glorify God by life or by 
death. 2. That whoever is uneasy on 
any account (bodily pain alone ex- 
cepted) carries in himself his own 
conviction that he is so far an unbe- 
100 



liever. . . . And if he bring the 
matter more close, he will always 
find, beside the general want of faith, 
every particular uneasiness is evi- 
dently owing to the want of some 
particular Christian temper. 

Sun., 28. O how has God renewed 
my strength, who used ten years ago 
to be so faint and weary with preach- 
ihg twice in one day ! 

Sat., 20. . . . We begged of God 
to increase our faith. Meanwhile 
her pangs increased more and more, 
so that one would have imagined, 
for the violence of the throes, her 
body must have been shattered in 
pieces. One who was clearly con- 
vinced this was no natural disorder 
said, "I think Satan is let loose; I 
fear he will not stop here"; and 
added, "I command thee in the name 
of the Lord Jesus to tell if thou hast 
commission to torment any other 
soul." It was immediately an- 
swered: "I have: L Y — — and 

C R (two who lived at some 

distance and were then in perfect 
health). We betook ourselves to 
prayer again and ceased not till she 
began about six o'clock with a clear 
101 



voice, "Praise God, from whom all 
blessings flow." 

Sun., 30. One came to me by 
whom I used to profit much; but 
her conversation was now too high 
for me. It was far above out of my 
sight. My soul is sick of this sub- 
lime divinity. Let me think and 
speak as a little child. Let my re- 
ligion be plain, artless, simple. 
Meekness, temperance, patience, 
faith, and love, be these my highest 
gifts. 

Sun., 14. I began preaching about 
five o'clock (a thing never heard of 
before in these parts). . . . And 
the victorious sweetness of the grace 
of God was present with his word. 

Wed., 24. In the evening the word 
of God was indeed quick and power- 
ful. Afterwards I desired the men 
as well as the women to meet; but 
I could not speak to them. The 
spirit of prayer was so poured upon 
us all that we could only speak to 
God. 

Thur., 20. . . . When the mob of 

Walsal came pouring in like a flood. 

The mob from Darlston made what 

defense they could; but they were 

102 



weary as well as outnumbered; so 
that, in a short time, many being 
knocked down, the rest ran away, 
and left me in their hands. To at- 
tempt to speak was vain; for the 
noise was like the roaring of the sea ; 
so they dragged me along till we 
came to the town, . . . but a man, 
catching me by the hair, pulled me 
back in the middle of the mob. I 
now continued speaking all the time 
to those within hearing, feeling no 
pain or weariness. ... I stood at 
the door and asked: "Are you will- 
ing to hear me speak ?" Many cried 
out : "No, no ! Knock his brains out ; 
down with him; kill him at once!" 
Others said: "Nay, but we will hear 
him first." I began asking: "What 
evil have I done? Which of you all 
have I wronged in word or deed?" 
And continued speaking for a quar- 
ter of an hour, till my voice sudden- 
ly failed. Then the floods began to 
lift up their voice again, many crying 
out: "Bring him away; bring him 
away!" In the meantime my 
strength and my voice returned, and 
I broke out aloud in prayer. And 
now the man who had just before 
headed the mob turned and said: 
Sir, I will spend my life for you; 
103 



follow me, and not one soul here 
shall touch a hair of your head." 

Mon., 24. In the evening, as I was 
reading prayers at Snowfields, I 
found such light and strength as I 
never remember to have had before. 
I saw every thought (as well as ac- 
tion or word) just as it was rising in 
my heart, and whether it was right 
before God or tainted with pride or 
selfishness. I never knew before (I 
mean at this time) what it was to 
"be still before God." 

Tues., 25. I waked, by the grace of 
God, in the same spirit, and about 
eight, being with two or three that 
believed in Jesus, I felt such an awe 
and tender sense of the presence of 
God as greatly confirmed me there- 
in; so that God was before me all 
the day long. I sought and found 
him in every place, and could truly 
say when I lay down at night : "Now 
I have lived a day." 

Aug. 4. I preached at five and re- 
turned to my brother, whom I had 
left at Leeds. At noon we spent an 
hour with several of our preachers 
in exhortation and prayer. About 
one I preached to a crowded audience 
104 



of high and low, rich and poor; but 
their number was abundantly en- 
larged at five, as was my strength 
both of body and soul. I then 
waited on Mr. M — — for an hour. 

how could I delight in such an 
acquaintance! But the will of God 
be done! Let me acquaint myself 
with him, and it is enough. 

Thur., 24. Just as I began to 
preach, the sun broke and shone ex- 
ceeding hot on the side of my head. 

1 found,- if it continued, I should not 
be able to speak long, and lifted up 
my heart to God. In a minute or 
two it was covered with clouds, 
which continued till the service was 
over. Let any who please call this 
chance ; I call it an answer to prayer. 
[Such experiences are recorded again 
and again in the Journal, even to the 
breaking of calms and deliverances 
from storms at sea. They are never 
unduly emphasized and always 
transpire when his life and strength 
are stretched to their utmost in com- 
munion and service to God and men.] 

Mon., 5. . . . And in the meantime 
we are laboring to secure the preach- 
ing houses to the next generation. 
In the name of God, let us, if possi- 

105 



ble, secure the present generation 
from drawing back to perdition ! Let 
all the preachers that are still alive 
to God join together as one man, 
fast and pray, lift up their voice as a 
trumpet, be instant in season, out of 
season, to convince them they are 
fallen; and exhort them instantly to 
"repent and do the first works." 

Mon., 28 June. To-day I entered on 
my eighty-second year and found 
myself just as strong to labor and as 
fit for exercise of body or mind as I 
was forty years ago. I do not impute 
this to second causes, but to the Sov- 
ereign Lord of all. I am as strong 
at eighty-one as I was at twenty-one, 
but abundantly more healthy, being a 
stranger to headache, toothache, and 
other bodily disorders which at- 
tended me in my youth. While we 
live, let us live unto Him! 

[The following when he was 
eighty-five:] Wed., 12. I had no 
thought of preaching at Collumpton, 
though we were to pass through it; 
but I yielded to importunity and 
preached at one to a numerous audi- 
ence. Thence we went on to Exeter, 
where I preached at six. We set out 
at three on the next morning and 
106 



reached Plymouth between one and 
two in the afternoon, where I 
preached to a large audience; and 
although the day was extremely hot, 
yet I found myself better yesterday 
and to-day than I have been for some 
months. . . . The best of all is, God 
is with us! 

And now — once more— it is Sunday. 
The myriad-myriad wheels of toil are 
hushed; while other myriads of pleasure 
craft are running fast and far and heed- 
less. Between and above them is the still- 
ness and the peace of the American Sab- 
bath afternoon. Here in this Methodist 
church, from which the people have so 
lately dispersed, is a veritable focus and 
whispering gallery of it all. The reflec- 
tion of the strong-faced men of the 
world's work and thought is on these 
walls; the challenge and inspiration of 
the wistful women, from youth to home- 
sick and thoughtful age, with many chil- 
dren amongst them, are in this air; the 
echoes of the best hopes of the people in 
aspiring hymn, the radiance of their 
friendship, the beauty of their praise, the 
107 



fragrance of their charity, the heaviness 
of their burdens, the traces of their temp- 
tation, the confession of their sin, the 
sanctity of their many sorrows. 

From the outside float back in here 
upon their minister the honk of the gay 
seekers for pleasure, the love-making of 
the youthful pair in the church lawn, the 
song of a mother to her child, the crunch- 
ing step of the slow-walking laborer out 
for the only airing of the week with his 
family — all gathered up and multiplied 
here as in some divine acdusticon of the 
Eternal Compassion. — 

It pleased the Lord, for his right- 
eousness' sake, to make the teaching 
great and glorious. 

But this is a people robbed and 
spoiled; they are all of them snared 
in holes, and they are hid in prison 
houses : they are for a prey, and none 
delivereth ; for a spoil, and none saith, 
Restore. 

Who is there among you that will 
give ear to this? Who will hearken 
and hear for the coming time? 
108 



Ill 



THE BOOK OF BOOKS 



A Cartoon of the Good News 



The soul and body make a man. The spirit and 
discipline make a Christian, 

Have your parishioners the life of religion in their 
souls? Have they so much as the form of it? Are 

the people of W in general any better than those 

of S — or N / Alas! sir, what is it that hinders 

your reaping the fruit of so much pain and so many 
prayers? 

How is this? Do I yet please men? Is the offense 
of the Cross ceased? It seems, after being scandalous 
near titty years, I am at length growing into an hon* 
orable man, —John Wesley's Journal. 



Ill 



THE BOOK OF BOOKS 

A Cartoon of the Good News 

^f T seems good, at the close of the 
1|| first century of its recognized his- 
^-^ tory in America, to review the Su- 
preme Book once more somewhat in the 
entirety of its constructive place and in- 
fluence in the whole drama of modern 
civilized life. 

Have we not had all but an excess of 
pious piecemeal explanation, magazine 
interpretation, graded literature, canned 
comment, and baled annotation about the 
Bible? Is not a man lonesome now and 
again for the Big Book, for the whole 
sweeping, self -attesting, wonder-working 
Word of God, with its old far horizons, 
bottomless fundamentals, topless inspira- 
tions, and the majestic thunder-and-whis- 
per movement of its oceanic bearing 
along the whole shore line of human life? 
It is wearisome, and often next to wholly 
unprofitable, to be squinting over the 
Scriptures, attempting to measure their 
grand message by an endless inductive 
in 



examination, as though one would pul- 
verize a statue to understand it, or ana- 
lyze the anthems of ocean by the sputter- 
ings of innumerable skillets. 

To be sure, there is a literature of the 
Bible; for that single volume has been 
for ages a sort of linotype melting pot into 
which the cold forms of human utterance 
have been cast and re-cast, to be re- 
melted and brought forth again in due 
time white-hot in the throbbing terms of 
living experience. The Bible is not mere- 
ly literature; it is and has been and will 
be the very mother of literatures, for the 
excellent reason that in it, as nowhere 
else, form is legitimately wedded to 
thought, and there is an absence of that 
tawdry intellectual bastardy of expres- 
sion divorced from experience. — 

Deep calleth unto deep at the noise of Thy water- 
spouts; 
All Thy waves and Thy billows are gone over me. 

Assuredly, the logic of the Bible has 

formed the concrete categories of modern 

definitive thinking, for the reason that 

man is himself a unit and always limps 

112 



along on three legs mentally, save when 
the shock and appeal of reality command 
or inspire him to put the other foot down. 
Man is ever a thinker — when he has really 
lived. Thinking is but an aspect of liv- 
ing. In the Bible, art and experience are 
met together, reason and reality have 
kissed each other ; and the coil of its logic 
in the high argument between God and 
man might well tie Aristotle hand and 
foot. 

Ethics is what others find in the Bible 
— an insistent, imperious, and inexorable 
morality. All the music of its literature 
and movement of its logic urge the one 
solemn accent of righteousness ; all the 
ocean roar of its wide romance through 
nature and the generations throbs as the 
sea to the one ever-recurring key of 
righteousness; all its very fragments and 
detached texts echo, as the sea conch on 
your grandmother's parlor floor, the one 
mystical, deathless call to righteousness. 
Only, when excellent gentlemen, much 
concerned for the regular collection of 
their monthly rentals, insist on appropri- 
ating the whole Bible to the village gos- 
8 113 



pel of paying one's debts and keeping out 
of jail, one reads the twenty-third Psalm 
or the tenth of St. John and is not con- 
vinced. 

As a chart of supernatural relations 
also, the Bible commends itself to yet 
other people. Somewhat better than a 
Book of Magic, yet of that order; the 
literature of transcendence, draped with 
superstition even while guiding the race 
out of the same; the code of the super- 
natural; the leaves of the Cumaen Cave; 
the oracles of God. Let us all repeat the 
Golden Text! One hastens to register a 
solemn respect and a reverent valuation 
for this historic and indispensable service 
of the Scriptures. Not without reason 
has the Arminian Bible inscribed across 
its cover in letters of gold, "The Breath 
of God." Yet when no more is won from 
these portentous pages than a sort of 
acute piosity in higher superstition, while 
we march forth on Sabbath mornings with 
the sacred volume under our arms, it may 
well be wondered how long it is to be 
before the Bible is superseded by Dr. 
Spook and all the other spooks of the So- 
i*4 



ciety for the Advancement of Psychical 
Research. 

What, then, if not literature, nor logic, 
nor ethics, nor transcendence, is the 
Bible? And where is its distinguishing 
characteristic and function? One may 
humbly but boldly, as in a swift cartoon, 
offer his twofold answer: 

First, God.— God the Utterer, God on 
His Word. 

There is, we all know, a sort of pale 
Christianity with Christ left out, an end- 
less essaying and thumbing of revelation, 
with no recognition of the Revealer, a 
profession of divinity with Deity un- 
known, theology as a science with Theos 
ignored, which at last all comes to no 
more than a refined atheism. 

Now, the essential characteristic of the 
Bible, wholly and fairly regarded, is that 
here is heard the voice of the Lord God 
walking in the cool of the day, ever call- 
ing, "Adam, where art thou?" Many are 
the by-ways and little bridges, and often 
the open, shoreless sands. But whether 
by the desert road or riverside, whether 
in the sweeping mountain fires, or among 
ii5 



the gentle sheep of the valley, or by the 
glistering gate of the King, the soul of 
man comes at length face to face with 
his God. In Homer, the Koran, and else- 
where we may gather vague report and 
traces of him. Here we cannot miss him. 
If "the universe is the garment of God," 
the Eible is his articulate will in terms of 
human history — the voice of what some- 
body has startlingly called "The Human 
Life of God." Up and down all the ways 
of earth, across the centuries, a Some- 
thing outside humanity has been trying 
to get itself said in terms of human 
speech. Men have now and again caught 
syllables of it and have not on the whole 
been surprised : it was what they had half 
been waiting for, their most ancient ex- 
pectation. At times to some open soul 
the scattered syllables have marshaled 
themselves into a sentence, a law, a 
prayer, a prophecy, an interpretation. 
Then men's hearts have burned within 
them while the Unknown has talked with 
them by the way; and they have felt as 
the woman of the African bush, who, 
after hearing her first Christian sermon, 
116 



touched her companion on the arm and 
said: "There, I always told you there 
ought to be a God like that!" So this 
Book, deep and human and crude and di- 
vine as it is, is at last no mere blind alley 
of belles'lettres, It is the voice of One 
who even deeplier reserves himself, who 
has many things to say to us which we 
cannot bear now, whom we half see and 
half feel in his beauty beyond the brow 
of the green hill, or marching by on the 
night wind outside the door, or breathing 
in the face of a sleeping child — a tireless 
Power making for light, a measureless 
and eternal Energy working for good, an 
infinite, all-mastering Personality rejoic- 
ing in life and friendship and holiness, 
and inspiring in us the hope and glad will 
of it all. — 

Hush, I pray you ! 
What if this friend happen to be — God ? 

But answer number two: Man — man 
the animal, the eater, and the artist ; man 
the sinner and the conqueror of sin, the 
moral coward and the moral king. 

Looked at this way, the Bible may be 
said to have for its work and effect 
117 



hardly more the revealing of God to 
men than the revealing of men to them- 
selves. The great Book, the very Ut- 
terance of God, with an enormous hu- 
man plus. If it has been the Word of 
God calling for Adam, nevertheless it has 
been grounded in the garden of Adam's 
earthly affairs also. Viewed in its vast 
bearings on the educative and formative 
processes of the world and in its emer- 
gence out of them, it has been a heavenly 
seed in human soil. Nor could it have 
been brought to the full corn save under 
the sunshine and showers of the slow- 
succeeding seasons of human experience. 
How much dearer, grander, diviner than 
any album of celestial literature or trea- 
tise of iron logic or spell-book of fiat mys- 
tery, that we may trace here, in their sim- 
ple human beginnings, in the sweep of 
their history across the centuries, and in 
their dynamic power on modern life, the 
primordial and formative ideas which 
have been imbedded in the minds and un- 
folded through the generations of men ! 

Consider, for example, the beginning 
and growth, as we actually have it in the 
118 



Scriptures, of the idea of God. At first it 
is as the faint far blush of silentest dawn. 
How slowly it rises out of the infinite 
murk into the cold-steel glint, the tremu- 
lous lavender bannerettes, and at last the 
golden all-enfolding wings of the day- 
spring from on high ! In the earliest con- 
ception of God, even among the purest 
and best, he is no more in representation 
than a mud doll which a pretty and lying 
woman may hide under her saddle. But 
later he is the Righteous One whose fear 
is the beginning of wisdom, and the An- 
swerer of Elijah's prayer. In the end, the 
open password of universal approach to 
him is a confident "Our Father." And 
having caught this open secret, a great 
saint in one of the most tender and ex- 
alted passages of all letters declares, to 
our astonishment, that, just as we proud- 
ly teach our infant children to call our 
names, so he hath sent forth his Spirit, 
bending above the cradle of our hearts 
crying, that we may at length learn to cry 
after him, "Abba, Father!" 

Or, let us trace the origin and increase 
of the estimate of a human life, How 
119 



meager, cheap, precarious in the begin- 
ning! Whether at the hands of nature 
or of men, it was a thing to be stabbed 
and ambushed, scoffed at and sold and 
damned. Even God, who called Cain to 
his terrible account, could not seem to 
secure that a man should not sell his wife 
or drive his child through the flames. 
The great Abrahamic episode of human 
sacrifice by no means manifests the com- 
monly supposed blind obedience to an in- 
scrutably cruel command, but the in- 
finitely better struggle in a God-believing 
man's conscience over the value of a hu- 
man life. Others around him are offering 
up their first-born to appease the wrath 
of their angry gods. The great patriarch 
is coming out of all this; and his daring 
faith, that broke with the conventional 
religion of his barbaric day and trusted 
God for a higher estimate of human per- 
sonality, marked a mighty turning point 
in human history. But progress was 
slow; and even the great and gentle 
Moses, the early amanuensis of the Al- 
mighty, who in that first chapter, the 
"poem of Creation," portrays man as 
120 



made in the image of God, must needs 
decree an eye for an eye, and suffers men 
to be bored through their ears like cattle. 
Yet farther on in the unfolding Scrip- 
ture one sees men begin to straighten up 
from the sweaty mire of oppression and 
wretchedness and storm the very stair- 
ways of God in the pathetic and im- 
perious assertion of a character closer to 
him than cattle or slaves: "My heart is 
smitten and withered like grass, so that 
I forget to eat my bread. My bones 
cleave to my skin. I am like a pelican 
of the desert. . . . Will the Lord cast 
off forever? Will he be favorable no 
more? Is his mercy clean gone? Doth 
his promise fail? . . . Shall not the 
Judge of all the earth do right?" And 
in the finish of the matchless romance of 
man's life in these writings the genius 
of St. John and the inspiration of the 
open skies are taxed fairly to set forth 
the happiness and the honor of men's 
glorious nature and estate: "These are 
they which came out of great tribulation 
and have washed their robes. . . . 
Therefore are they before the throne of 
121 



God, and they shall see his face, and they 
shall reign forever and ever." 

A short survey of the conception of 
sacrifice in the Bible will give the same 
impression of dim birth, slow growth, 
and grand elevation. At first it is crude, 
cowardly, repugnant. Recall that frag- 
ment of the family quarrel which Moses 
had with his half-heathen wife over the 
dedication of their two sons to Jehovah 
in the rite of circumcision. One can hear 
the tent door snap as the woman passes 
within, yielding with the proverbial last 
word: "A bloody husband thou art to 
me!" The very origin of incense, com- 
monly thought to have been so acceptable 
to God, was in the effort to allay the 
stench of slaughtered animals about the 
sacred places. But farther on David will 
not drink the water which comes at the 
hazard of his comrades, Jonathan forfeits 
kingship to keep friendship, and up the 
slow, tortuous ascent of Scriptural history 
are at length heard the accents of some 
soul sick of slaughter rites: "Mine ears 
hast thou opened. Sacrifice and burnt 
offering hast thou not required. Then 

122 



said I, Lo, I come. In the volume of thy 
Book it is written, I delight to do thy 
will." While later, down from the open 
pastures of Galilee, comes the voice of 
One saying of himself : "The Good Shep- 
herd giveth his life for the sheep." And 
out of the blood and wrongs of the ages 
emerges the voluntary, sacrificial Cross 
of the Son of Man as the symbol of an 
infinite loveliness and gain: "Who, for 
the joy that was set before him, endured 
the Cross, looking down on the shame, 
and on the right hand of the throne of 
God hath sat down." 

Immortality also, that summit of the 
soul's demand on life — is it to be sup- 
posed that the divine dream of it shines 
forth alike on every page of this Holy 
Writ? On the contrary, in the opening 
of the great account it seems fairly to 
have been left out of the program. 
Nevertheless, the restless dream came on, 
and rose from the pluri-personal night- 
mare of a witch resort to the daring filial 
clamor, "Thou wilt not leave my soul in 
the grave. ... At thy right hand are 
pleasures forevermore" ; till in the thrill- 
123 



ing experience of life more abundant it 
comes to be a sort of sixth sense, so vital 
that in Jesus it is no longer a hope nor 
an argument, but a demonstration. "Be- 
cause I live, ye shall live also." Paul 
stretches to the full height of a man made 
in the image of God and cries: "This 
mortal must put on immortality!" And 
from that day the faith of man soars 
from the lowlands of the grave to the 
endless life, as the sea bird makes wing 
to the open sea. 

Surely the Bible, read in a large and 
just way, discloses first the dawning im- 
pression and at length the overmastering 
certainty of a vast harvest of truth. 
"Light has been sown for the righteous, 
and gladness for the upright in heart." 
It is the Book of Mankind. Other great 
books — and we ought not to forget that 
there are other great books — have been 
the books of their respective countries or 
ages or stages of development. Homer or 
the Vedas, Confucius, the Koran — these 
and all the others are strictly answerable 
to such limitations. Mrs. Baker Eddy, of 
Boston, Pastor Russell, of several places, 
124 



Ella Wheeler Wilcox, of everywhere, with 
their new thought and their no thought, 
their stray thought and their stolen 
thought — what do they signify? In a re- 
cent fresh reading of Homer's "Iliad" in 
Bryant's classic translation (safer for the 
most of us than the original Greek!) the 
writer was forced to confess, even out of 
a considerable store of Hellenic enthusi- 
asm, that the actual art of Homer is little 
less crude than that of the colored supple- 
ment or of the movie vestibules; whilst 
the moral order of it all, when it is not 
grossly disgusting, need hardly be taken 
more seriously than the supposedly hu- 
morous cartoons of Messrs. Mutt and 
Jeff. 

On the other hand, the Bible has fairly 
found a home for itself 

Where'er a human heart doth wear 
Joy's myrtle wreath or sorrow's gyves. 

In every land and language its message 
and whole effect are the same, and that 
message and that effect are peerlessly 
forward and upward. The plummet of 
mankind's sinning and suffering and the 
125 



summit of his aspiration and destiny are 
here, as in a cartoon of the Eternal Com- 
passion. And it is all here as he himself 
has lived it — dimly at first and slowly, 
pitifully, shamefully, but at last prevail- 
ingly ; till as the whole history of a man's 
physical life may be read in the state of 
his body at a given time, so in this Book 
of Books lies imbedded and may be read 
the history of the race. — 

Slowly the Bible of the race is writ. 

And not on paper leaves or leaves of stone; 
Each age, each clime, each kindred adds to it 

Texts of despair or hope, of joy or moan. 
While swings the sea, while mists the mountains 
shroud, 
While thunder's surges burst on cliffs of cloud, 
Still at the prophets' feet the nations sit. 
126 






====== IV 

TO MEN OF ARMS.— OF LEGS ALSO 
A Cartoon of the World's Work 



There's a lot o' brothers knockin' about as people 
don't know on, eh what? See what I mean? 

— Charles Rann Kennedy. 






IV 



TO MEN OF ARMS.— OF LEGS ALSO 
A Cartoon of the World's Work 

3N the ancient Book of its origins the 
Church is designated variously as 
the House of God, the Place of 
Prayer, the Sanctuary, the Assembly of 
the Righteous, the Flock of God, the 
Temple, the Body of Christ, the Bride of 
the Lord, the Congregation of the Saints, 
the Body of Believers, the Holy City — 
these designations, and perhaps as many 
more, from this source alone. Assuredly 
there has been no want of effort in the 
literature of religion to give name to this 
organ of religion. Yet the effort nowhere 
even approaches success; and the result, 
notwithstanding the wealth of poetic, 
philosophic, and practical suggestion 
lavished upon it, is left fragmentary and 
incomplete. 

In the centuries that have followed, the 
ultimate description has remained equally 
as elusive. Whether regarded as the 
politico-ecclesiastical establishment of 
Moses, as the spiritual fabric built by 
9 129 



Christ on the fisherman's confession, or 
as the ganglion center of our modern 
mingled reverence and complaint, there 
has been found no word nor way of think- 
ing in modern life with which one may 
feel sure at once of grasping and of set- 
ting forth this historic and elemental in- 
stitution. She has been with us from of 
old, seldom satisfactory, never negligible. 
On the human side, like a sort of wife of 
the world, sometimes hard to be got on 
with, always impossible to be got on 
without. She may be loved, feared, 
fought, hated, adored, but not despised. 
And she is with us this day, the greatest 
institution, looked at every way, amongst 
men, to be reckoned with by all who 
think or work or care. 

Why not be glad that she is not so 
rigidly definable? The growthless image 
of Diana, that fell from heaven at Ephe- 
sus, was that. Why not understand that 
the Church, the real, the living Church, 
whom age cannot wither nor custom 
stale, does not seek to set up for one time 
and country the definitions and ideals of 
another time and country? Why not 
130 



dare think that the Church was from the 
beginning intended by her God to be all 
that men, her sons, through all their pass- 
ing generations, should need her to be? 
Why not dare say that there has been at 
last found what has been well named the 
common denominator of all these multi- 
plied denominations; and that that com- 
mon denominator consists of the actual 
religious, social, and industrial lives being 
at any given time lived by their mem- 
bers? In this day of self-adding and self- 
subtracting machines men of the world 
are no longer left incapable of reducing 
the religious appeals and the ecclesiasti- 
cal claims of the Churches to this com- 
mon denominator. And in the long run 
it will be found that the Master's para- 
dox, "Whosoever willeth to save his life 
shall lose it; but he that loseth his life 
for the sake of others shall save it," is no 
less applicable to Churches than to in- 
dividuals. 

To raise the value of this common de- 
nominator, to enrich the volume of this 
common service, to bear onward the ban- 
ner of this common life on the earth to- 
131 



gether — this is the determining law of a 
Church, as power is the determining law 
of an engine or beauty of a flower. And 
in this function and effect, whatever the 
false emphasis which for a time she may 
have seemed to put on some one side of 
the truth, she has achieved a record un- 
matched and is invested with an oppor- 
tunity unparalleled. The fraternal orders 
are proud to dispute with her a fragment 
of her beneficent program and to borrow 
of her oil of consolation in the hour of 
death when the Bridegroom comes, the 
great journals plume their editorial pages 
with the stolen glory of her good tidings, 
and what secret society or modern 
brotherhood can offer to a loyal son of 
the living Church a single additional in- 
centive to what he already possesses for 
a just and generous bearing unto any 
other man? The highest and best in- 
stance of brotherhood and social service 
which the world has witnessed or will 
soon witness is the foreign missionary 
program which she had pursued for cen- 
turies before we had even discovered our 
like problems at home. There is not a 
132 



ligament of the larger-minded modern 
relations of men that did not grow up out 
of the gospel she has urged through the 
ages. And the best ideals and the best 
language of men, when they have sup- 
posed that they have cast her off and 
have gone apart in special industrial or 
social organizations to realize their own 
ends, have been always unconsciously 
reconvertible into the very speech with 
which her whole history has been satu- 
rated and into the very ideals with which 
her whole career has been crowned. 

In a newly settled and exclusive suburb 
of a leading Southern city, less than a 
decade ago, there was no church. The 
people were just throwing the slopes into 
additions and selling the additions in lots. 
Concrete walks superseded gullies, ter- 
races shouldered away the ragged hack 
forests, and houses multiplied as in fairy- 
land. These things, together with the 
journeys downtown to select their furni- 
ture or clip their coupons, consumed the 
neighborhood interest for some five years. 
They had burned out on musicales, lec- 
tures, and theaters before having moved 
133 



out there. The Sunday newspaper, lit- 
tle formal, tiresome journeys down to the 
city churches, which, however, gradually 
ceased, a day of lounging, mixed with 
some interchange of aimless visits, wore 
the day of rest and religion wearily away. 
And there was a neighborhood as dumb, 
awkward, and miserable as any back- 
woods village party when the boys and 
girls are "on the jury," and nobody has 
risen to the emergency of stirring them up. 
But there came a day when that was 
precisely what occurred. Something hap- 
pened to them from outside themselves. 
One of these inevitable denominations, 
with the least possible solicitation from 
the citizens, thrust out an arm and 
dropped at the mouth of one of their best 
streets an insignificant-looking little por- 
table church building. It appeared pious- 
ly hopeless, celestially quixotic. But a 
few of the children, afterwards some 
youth and women, then strong men, and 
at length everybody crowded the little 
chapel till it was doubled in size and 
thronged again. That was not five years 
ago. To-day they have a handsome build- 
134 



ing, a vigorous, enthusiastic membership, 
an aggressive young minister specially 
fitted for the very needs of such a con- 
gregation. The old Church followed 
them, overtook them, rediscovered them 
to themselves, and became to them what 
they most needed. — 

City of God, how broad and far 

Outspread thy walls sublime! 
The true, thy chartered freemen are 

Of every age and clime. 

How purely bath thy speech come down 

From man's primeval youth! 
How grandly hath thine empire groarn 

Of freedom, love, and truth! 

Of Industry also it may be said that she 
is from of old, has been gifted with a 
manifold expression, yet has never come 
into her own. The spirit of toil has had 
the whole of human history for her work- 
shop and for her temple the four walls 
of the world. 

Of Labor, no less than of Religion, 
might the seer have said: 

The Lord formed me in the beginning of his way. 
Before the hills was I brought forth; 
While as yet he had not made the earth, 

135 



Nor the fields, 

Nor the beginning of the dust of the world. 

When he established the heavens, I was there; 
When he set a circle upon the face of the deep; 
When he made firm the skies above: 
When the fountains of the deep became strong: 
When he gave to the sea its bound, 
That the waters should not transgress his com- 
mandment. 

When he marked out the foundations of the earth, 

Then I was by him, 

As a master workman. 

. . . And my delight was with the sons of men. 

But whilst the Church has kindled the 
altars of her superstition, Industry has 
clanked the chains of her slavery. If the 
Church has suffered the curse of priest- 
craft, Industry has bitten the dust of 
peonage. And as the Church is seen to- 
day, coming from the inside of the 
world's sacristy, casting off the impeding 
gown of her excessive individualism, to 
enter her larger service and to claim her 
richer reward, Industry is seen coming 
from the outside and knocking at the 
doors of the world's conscience with the 
petition that she be permitted to help 
build that Kingdom of God in which the 
136 



workers, their wives and children, hold, 
with us and ours, a common stake. And, 
with that petition, she brings along the 
just claim that, while the workingman of 
America is now receiving an average 
daily wage of one dollar and a half a day, 
a just apportionment of the increase of 
wealth which he is helping to produce in 
this country year by year would yield 
him from ten to twelve dollars per day. 
How much would his ability to cooperate 
with us be affected could he and his fam- 
ily have that daily difference? What be- 
comes of that money? And if neither 
God nor man has any use for a Church 
which does not serve to lift and gladden 
human life, what shall be said or thought 
of these modern temples of toil, with their 
smoking altar forges of human sacrifice? 
What difference, though their smoke- 
stacks are a hundred feet high and we call 
them factories? Are we, with all our 
boasted prosperity, no farther along than 
when John Stuart Mill a century ago re- 
minded us that all the machinery ever in- 
vented had never lifted a single burden 
from human society? Or are we just ar- 
137 



pel of paying one's debts and keeping out 
of jail, one reads the twenty-third Psalm 
or the tenth of St. John and is not con- 
vinced. 

As a chart ol supernatural relations 
also, the Bible commends itself to yet 
other people. Somewhat better than a 
Book of Magic, yet of that order; the 
literature of transcendence, draped with 
superstition even while guiding the race 
out of the same; the code of the super- 
natural; the leaves of the Cumsen Cave; 
the oracles of God. Let us all repeat the 
Golden Text! One hastens to register a 
solemn respect and a reverent valuation 
for this historic and indispensable service 
of the Scriptures. Not without reason 
has the Arminian Bible inscribed across 
its cover in letters of gold, "The Breath 
of God." Yet when no more is won from 
these portentous pages than a sort of 
acute piosity in higher superstition, while 
we march forth on Sabbath mornings with 
the sacred volume under our arms, it may 
well be wondered how long it is to be 
before the Bible is superseded by Dr. 
Spook and all the other spooks of the So- 
114 



ciety for the Advancement of Psychical 
Research. 

What, then, if not literature, nor logic, 
nor ethics, nor transcendence, is the 
Bible? And where is its distinguishing 
characteristic and function? One may 
humbly but boldly, as in a swift cartoon, 
offer his twofold answer: 

First, God. — God the Utterer, God on 
His Word. 

There is, we all know, a sort of pale 
Christianity with Christ left out, an end- 
less essaying and thumbing of revelation, 
with no recognition of the Revealer, a 
profession of divinity with Deity un- 
known, theology as a science with Theos 
ignored, which at last all comes to no 
more than a refined atheism. 

Now, the essential characteristic of the 
Bible, wholly and fairly regarded, is that 
here is heard the voice of the Lord God 
walking in the cool of the day, ever call- 
ing, "Adam, where art thou?" Many are 
the by-ways and little bridges, and often 
the open, shoreless sands. But whether 
by the desert road or riverside, whether 
in the sweeping mountain fires, or among 
115 



the gentle sheep of the valley, or by the 
glistering gate of the King, the soul of 
man comes at length face to face with 
his God. In Homer, the Koran, and else- 
where we may gather vague report and 
traces of him. Here we cannot miss him. 
If "the universe is the garment of God," 
the Eible is his articulate will in terms of 
human history — the voice of what some- 
body has startlingly called "The Human 
Life of God." Up and down all the ways 
of earth, across the centuries, a Some- 
thing outside humanity has been trying 
to get itself said in terms of human 
speech. Men have now and again caught 
syllables of it and have not on the whole 
been surprised : it was what they had half 
been waiting for, their most ancient ex- 
pectation. At times to some open soul 
the scattered syllables have marshaled 
themselves into a sentence, a law, a 
prayer, a prophecy, an interpretation. 
Then men's hearts have burned within 
them while the Unknown has talked with 
them by the way; and they have felt as 
the woman of the African bush, who, 
after hearing her first Christian sermon, 
116 



touched her companion on the arm and 
said: "There, I always told you there 
ought to be a God like that!" So this 
Book, deep and human and crude and di- 
vine as it is, is at last no mere blind alley 
of belles'lettres, It is the voice of One 
who even deeplier reserves himself, who 
has many things to say to us which we 
cannot bear now, whom we half see and 
half feel in his beauty beyond the brow 
of the green hill, or marching by on the 
night wind outside the door, or breathing 
in the face of a sleeping child — a tireless 
Power making for light, a measureless 
and eternal Energy working for good, an 
infinite, all-mastering Personality rejoic- 
ing in life and friendship and holiness, 
and inspiring in us the hope and glad will 
of it all. — 

Hush, I pray you ! 
What if this friend happen to be — God ? 

But answer number two: Man — man 
the animal, the eater, and the artist ; man 
the sinner and the conqueror of sin, the 
moral coward and the moral king. 

Looked at this way, the Bible may be 
said to have for its work and effect 



hardly more the revealing of God to 
men than the revealing of men to them- 
selves. The great Book, the very Ut- 
terance of God, with an enormous hu- 
man plus. If it has been the Word of 
God calling for Adam, nevertheless it has 
been grounded in the garden of Adam's 
earthly affairs also. Viewed in its vast 
bearings on the educative and formative 
processes of the world and in its emer- 
gence out of them, it has been a heavenly 
seed in human soil. Nor could it have 
been brought to the full corn save under 
the sunshine and showers of the slow- 
succeeding seasons of human experience. 
How much dearer, grander, diviner than 
any album of celestial literature or trea- 
tise of iron logic or spell-book of fiat mys- 
tery, that we may trace here, in their sim- 
ple human beginnings, in the sweep of 
their history across the centuries, and in 
their dynamic power on modern life, the 
primordial and formative ideas which 
have been imbedded in the minds and un- 
folded through the generations of men ! 

Consider, for example, the beginning 
and growth, as we actually have it in the 
118 



Scriptures, of the idea of God, At first it 
is as the faint far blush of silentest dawn. 
How slowly it rises out of the infinite 
murk into the cold-steel glint, the tremu- 
lous lavender bannerettes, and at last the 
golden all-enfolding wings of the day- 
spring from on high ! In the earliest con- 
ception of God, even among the purest 
and best, he is no more in representation 
than a mud doll which a pretty and lying 
woman may hide under her saddle. But 
later he is the Righteous One whose fear 
is the beginning of wisdom, and the An- 
swerer of Elijah's prayer. In the end, the 
open password of universal approach to 
him is a confident "Our Father." And 
having caught this open secret, a great 
saint in one of the most tender and ex- 
alted passages of all letters declares, to 
our astonishment, that, just as we proud- 
ly teach our infant children to call our 
names, so he hath sent forth his Spirit, 
bending above the cradle of our hearts 
crying, that we may at length learn to cry 
after him, "Abba, Father!" 

Or, let us trace the origin and increase 
of the estimate of a human life, How 
119 



meager, cheap, precarious in the begin- 
ning! Whether at the hands of nature 
or of men, it was a thing to be stabbed 
and ambushed, scoffed at and sold and 
damned. Even God, who called Cain to 
his terrible account, could not seem to 
secure that a man should not sell his wife 
or drive his child through the flames. 
The great Abrahamic episode of human 
sacrifice by no means manifests the com- 
monly supposed blind obedience to an in- 
scrutably cruel command, but the in- 
finitely better struggle in a God-believing 
man's conscience over the value of a hu- 
man life. Others around him are offering 
up their first-born to appease the wrath 
of their angry gods. The great patriarch 
is coming out of all this; and his daring 
faith, that broke with the conventional 
religion of his barbaric day and trusted 
God for a higher estimate of human per- 
sonality, marked a mighty turning point 
in human history. But progress was 
slow; and even the great and gentle 
Moses, the early amanuensis of the Al- 
mighty, who in that first chapter, the 
"poem of Creation," portrays man as 
120 



made in the image of God, must needs 
decree an eye for an eye, and suffers men 
to be bored through their ears like cattle. 
Yet farther on in the unfolding Scrip- 
ture one sees men begin to straighten up 
from the sweaty mire of oppression and 
wretchedness and storm the very stair- 
ways of God in the pathetic and im- 
perious assertion of a character closer to 
him than cattle or slaves: "My heart is 
smitten and withered like grass, so that 
I forget to eat my bread. My bones 
cleave to my skin. I am like a pelican 
of the desert. . . . Will the Lord cast 
off forever? Will he be favorable no 
more? Is his mercy clean gone? Doth 
his promise fail? . . . Shall not the 
Judge of all the earth do right?" And 
in the finish of the matchless romance of 
man's life in these writings the genius 
of St. John and the inspiration of the 
open skies are taxed fairly to set forth 
the happiness and the honor of men's 
glorious nature and estate: "These are 
they which came out of great tribulation 
and have washed their robes. . . . 
Therefore are they before the throne of 

121 



God, and they shall see his face, and they 
shall reign forever and ever." 

A short survey of the conception of 
sacrifice in the Bible will give the same 
impression of dim birth, slow growth, 
and grand elevation. At first it is crude, 
cowardly, repugnant. Recall that frag- 
ment of the family quarrel which Moses 
had with his half-heathen wife over the 
dedication of their two sons to Jehovah 
in the rite of circumcision. One can hear 
the tent door snap as the woman passes 
within, yielding with the proverbial last 
word: "A bloody husband thou art to 
me!" The very origin of incense, com- 
monly thought to have been so acceptable 
to God, was in the effort to allay the 
stench of slaughtered animals about the 
sacred places. But farther on David will 
not drink the water which comes at the 
hazard of his comrades, Jonathan forfeits 
kingship to keep friendship, and up the 
slow, tortuous ascent of Scriptural history 
are at length heard the accents of some 
soul sick of slaughter rites: "Mine ears 
hast thou opened. Sacrifice and burnt 
offering hast thou not required. Then 

122 






said I, Lo, I come. In the volume of thy 
Book it is written, I delight to do thy 
will." While later, down from the open 
pastures of Galilee, comes the voice of 
One saying of himself: "The Good Shep- 
herd giveth his life for the sheep." And 
out of the blood and wrongs of the ages 
emerges the voluntary, sacrificial Cross 
of the Son of Man as the symbol of an 
infinite loveliness and gain: "Who, for 
the joy that was set before him, endured 
the Cross, looking down on the shame, 
and on the right hand of the throne of 
God hath sat down." 

Immortality also, that summit of the 
soul's demand on life — is it to be sup- 
posed that the divine dream of it shines 
forth alike on every page of this Holy 
Writ? On the contrary, in the opening 
of the great account it seems fairly to 
have been left out of the program. 
Nevertheless, the restless dream came on, 
and rose from the pluri-personal night- 
mare of a witch resort to the daring filial 
clamor, "Thou wilt not leave my soul in 
the grave. ... At thy right hand are 
pleasures forevermore" ; till in the thrill- 
123 



ing experience of life more abundant it 
comes to be a sort of sixth sense, so vital 
that in Jesus it is no longer a hope nor 
an argument, but a demonstration. "Be- 
cause I live, ye shall live also." Paul 
stretches to the full height of a man made 
in the image of God and cries: "This 
mortal must put on immortality !" And 
from that day the faith of man soars 
from the lowlands of the grave to the 
endless life, as the sea bird makes wing 
to the open sea. 

Surely the Bible, read in a large and 
just way, discloses first the dawning im- 
pression and at length the overmastering 
certainty of a vast harvest of truth. 
"Light has been sown for the righteous, 
and gladness for the upright in heart." 
It is the Book of Mankind. Other great 
books — and we ought not to forget that 
there are other great books — have been 
the books of their respective countries or 
ages or stages of development. Homer or 
the Vedas, Confucius, the Koran — these 
and all the others are strictly answerable 
to such limitations. Mrs. Baker Eddy, of 
Boston, Pastor Russell, of several places, 
124 



Ella Wheeler Wilcox, of everywhere, with 
their new thought and their no thought, 
their stray thought and their stolen 
thought — what do they signify? In a re- 
cent fresh reading of Homer's "Iliad" in 
Bryant's classic translation (safer for the 
most of us than the original Greek!) the 
writer was forced to confess, even out of 
a considerable store of Hellenic enthusi- 
asm, that the actual art of Homer is little 
less crude than that of the colored supple- 
ment or of the movie vestibules; whilst 
the moral order of it all, when it is not 
grossly disgusting, need hardly be taken 
more seriously than the supposedly hu- 
morous cartoons of Messrs. Mutt and 
Jeff. 

On the other hand, the Bible has fairly 
found a home for itself 

Where'er a human heart doth wear 
Joy's myrtle wreath or sorrow's gyves. 

In every land and language its message 
and whole effect are the same, and that 
message and that effect are peerlessly 
forward and upward. The plummet of 
mankind's sinning and suffering and the 
125 



summit of his aspiration and destiny are 
here, as in a cartoon of the Eternal Com- 
passion. And it is all here as he himself 
has lived it — dimly at first and slowly, 
pitifully, shamefully, but at last prevail- 
ingly ; till as the whole history of a man's 
physical life may be read in the state of 
his body at a given time, so in this Book 
of Books lies imbedded and may be read 
the history of the race. — 

Slowly the Bible of the race is writ. 

And not on paper leaves or leaves of stone; 
Each age, each clime, each kindred adds to it 

Texts of despair or hope, of joy or moan. 
While swings the sea, while mists the mountains 
shroud, 
While thunder's surges burst on cliffs of cloud, 
Still at the prophets' feet the nations sit. 
126 



=============================== IV 

TO MEN OF ARMS.— OF LEGS ALSO 

A Cartoon of the World's Work 



There's a lot o' brothers knockin' about as people 
don't know on, eh what? See what I mean ? 

— Charles Rann Kennedy. 



IV 



TO MEN OF ARMS.— OF LEGS ALSO 
A Cartoon of the World's Work 

3N the ancient Book of its origins the 
Church is designated variously as 
the House of God, the Place of 
Prayer, the Sanctuary, the Assembly of 
the Righteous, the Flock of God, the 
Temple, the Body of Christ, the Bride of 
the Lord, the Congregation of the Saints, 
the Body of Believers, the Holy City — 
these designations, and perhaps as many 
more, from this source alone. Assuredly 
there has been no want of effort in the 
literature of religion to give name to this 
organ of religion. Yet the effort nowhere 
even approaches success; and the result, 
notwithstanding the wealth of poetic, 
philosophic, and practical suggestion 
lavished upon it, is left fragmentary and 
incomplete. 

In the centuries that have followed, the 
ultimate description has remained equally 
as elusive. Whether regarded as the 
politico-ecclesiastical establishment of 
Moses, as the spiritual fabric built by 
9 129 



Christ on the fisherman's confession, or 
as the ganglion center of our modern 
mingled reverence and complaint, there 
has been found no word nor way of think- 
ing in modern life with which one may 
feel sure at once of grasping and of set- 
ting forth this historic and elemental in- 
stitution. She has been with us from of 
old, seldom satisfactory, never negligible. 
On the human side, like a sort of wife of 
the world, sometimes hard to be got on 
with, always impossible to be got on 
without. She may be loved, feared, 
fought, hated, adored, but not despised. 
And she is with us this day, the greatest 
institution, looked at every way, amongst 
men, to be reckoned with by all who 
think or work or care. 

Why not be glad that she is not so 
rigidly definable? The growthless image 
of Diana, that fell from heaven at Ephe- 
sus, was that. Why not understand that 
the Church, the real, the living Church, 
whom age cannot wither nor custom 
stale, does not seek to set up for one time 
and country the definitions and ideals of 
another time and country? Why not 
130 



dare think that the Church was from the 
beginning intended by her God to be all 
that men, her sons, through all their pass- 
ing generations, should need her to be? 
Why not dare say that there has been at 
last found what has been well named the 
common denominator of all these multi- 
plied denominations; and that that com- 
mon denominator consists of the actual 
religious, social, and industrial lives being 
at any given time lived by their mem- 
bers? In this day of self-adding and self- 
subtracting machines men of the world 
are no longer left incapable of reducing 
the religious appeals and the ecclesiasti- 
cal claims of the Churches to this com- 
mon denominator. And in the long run 
it will be found that the Master's para- 
dox, "Whosoever willeth to save his life 
shall lose it; but he that loseth his life 
for the sake of others shall save it," is no 
less applicable to Churches than to in- 
dividuals. 

To raise the value of this common de- 
nominator, to enrich the volume of this 
common service, to bear onward the ban- 
ner of this common life on the earth to- 
131 



gether — this is the determining law of a 
Church, as power is the determining law 
of an engine or beauty of a flower. And 
in this function and effect, whatever the 
false emphasis which for a time she may 
have seemed to put on some one side of 
the truth, she has achieved a record un- 
matched and is invested with an oppor- 
tunity unparalleled. The fraternal orders 
are proud to dispute with her a fragment 
of her beneficent program and to borrow 
of her oil of consolation in the hour of 
death when the Bridegroom comes, the 
great journals plume their editorial pages 
with the stolen glory of her good tidings, 
and what secret society or modern 
brotherhood can offer to a loyal son of 
the living Church a single additional in- 
centive to what he already possesses for 
a just and generous bearing unto any 
other man? The highest and best in- 
stance of brotherhood and social service 
which the world has witnessed or will 
soon witness is the foreign missionary 
program which she had pursued for cen- 
turies before we had even discovered our 
like problems at home. There is not a 
132 






ligament of the larger-minded modern 
relations of men that did not grow up out 
of the gospel she has urged through the 
ages. And the best ideals and the best 
language of men, when they have sup- 
posed that they have cast her off and 
have gone apart in special industrial or 
social organizations to realize their own 
ends, have been always unconsciously 
reconvertible into the very speech with 
which her whole history has been satu- 
rated and into the very ideals with which 
her whole career has been crowned. 

In a newly settled and exclusive suburb 
of a leading Southern city, less than a 
decade ago, there was no church. The 
people were just throwing the slopes into 
additions and selling the additions in lots. 
Concrete walks superseded gullies, ter- 
races shouldered away the ragged hack 
forests, and houses multiplied as in fairy- 
land. These things, together with the 
journeys downtown to select their furni- 
ture or clip their coupons, consumed the 
neighborhood interest for some five years. 
They had burned out on musicales, lec- 
tures, and theaters before having moved 
133 



out there. The Sunday newspaper, lit- 
tle formal, tiresome journeys down to the 
city churches, which, however, gradually 
ceased, a day of lounging, mixed with 
some interchange of aimless visits, wore 
the day of rest and religion wearily away. 
And there was a neighborhood as dumb, 
awkward, and miserable as any back- 
woods village party when the boys and 
girls are "on the jury," and nobody has 
risen to the emergency of stirring them up. 
But there came a day when that was 
precisely what occurred. Something hap- 
pened to them from outside themselves. 
One of these inevitable denominations, 
with the least possible solicitation from 
the citizens, thrust out an arm and 
dropped at the mouth of one of their best 
streets an insignificant-looking little por- 
table church building. It appeared pious- 
ly hopeless, celestially quixotic. But a 
few of the children, afterwards some 
3^outh and women, then strong men, and 
at length everybody crowded the little 
chapel till it was doubled in size and 
thronged again. That was not five years 
ago. To-day they have a handsome build- 
134 



ing, a vigorous, enthusiastic membership, 
an aggressive young minister specially 
fitted for the very needs of such a con- 
gregation. The old Church followed 
them, overtook them, rediscovered them 
to themselves, and became to them what 
they most needed. — 

City of God, how broad and far 

Outspread thy walls sublime! 
The true, thy chartered freemen are 

Of every age and clime. 

How purely hath thy speech come down 

From man's primeval youth! 
How grandly hath thine empire grown 

Of freedom, love, and truth! 

Of Industry also it may be said that she 
is from of old, has been gifted with a 
manifold expression, yet has never come 
into her own. The spirit of toil has had 
the whole of human history for her work- 
shop and for her temple the four walls 
of the world. 

Of Labor, no less than of Religion, 
might the seer have said: 

The Lord formed me in the beginning of his way. 
Before the hills was I brought forth; 
While as yet he had not made the earth, 

135 



Nor the fields, 

Nor the beginning of the dust of the world. 

When he established the heavens, I was there; 
When he set a circle upon the face of the deep; 
When he made firm the skies above: 
When the fountains of the deep became strong: 
When he gave to the sea its bound, 
That the waters should not transgress his com- 
mandment. 

When he marked out the foundations of the earth, 

Then I was by him, 

As a master workman. 

. . . And my delight was with the sons of men. 

But whilst the Church has kindled the 
altars of her superstition, Industry has 
clanked the chains of her slavery. If the 
Church has suffered the curse of priest- 
craft, Industry has bitten the dust of 
peonage. And as the Church is seen to- 
day, coming from the inside of the 
world's sacristy, casting off the impeding 
gown of her excessive individualism, to 
enter her larger service and to claim her 
richer reward, Industry is seen coming 
from the outside and knocking at the 
doors of the world's conscience with the 
petition that she be permitted to help 
build that Kingdom of God in which the 
136 



workers, their wives and children, hold, 
with us and ours, a common stake. And, 
with that petition, she brings along the 
just claim that, while the workingman of 
America is now receiving an average 
daily wage of one dollar and a half a day, 
a just apportionment of the increase of 
wealth which he is helping to produce in 
this country year by year would yield 
him from ten to twelve dollars per day. 
How much would his ability to cooperate 
with us be affected could he and his fam- 
ily have that daily difference? What be- 
comes of that money? And if neither 
God nor man has any use for a Church 
which does not serve to lift and gladden 
human life, what shall be said or thought 
of these modern temples of toil, with their 
smoking altar forges of human sacrifice? 
What difference, though their smoke- 
stacks are a hundred feet high and we call 
them factories? Are we, with all our 
boasted prosperity, no farther along than 
when John Stuart Mill a century ago re- 
minded us that all the machinery ever in- 
vented had never lifted a single burden 
from human society? Or are we just ar- 
137 



riving where Goldsmith said England 
was when he wrote that melancholy in- 
dictment of English aristocracy — 

111 fares the land, to hastening ills a prey, 
Where wealth accumulates, and men decay? 

Surely from the day of the Adamic 
doom, be it evil or good that in the sweat 
of their face men should eat bread, In- 
dustry also has been intended by God, 
who wrought the world, to be all that the 
sons and the daughters of men should 
need her to be. And Gerald Stanley Lee, 
in his wonderful book "Crowds," is right: 
"There is really considerable spiritual 
truth in having enough to eat." 

As for the call of the New Social Or- 
der, why not? 

Do men longer with their own hands 
toss wheat up in the air, that the wind 
may drive the chaff from it? Or stam- 
pede armies by pitchers with torches in 
them? Or ride to Congress horseback? 
Or weave their own cottonade trousers? 
Has there not been a process of combina- 
tion and cooperation in trade, production, 
and the making of money? And shall life 
be made social in production and com- 
138 



merce, but not in distribution and human 
service? Shall legislatures be social- wise 
in the way of getting there, but not in the 
effect of getting laws that make life rea- 
sonable and decent? Shall banks, biscuit 
factories, and perfume companies be so- 
cial-minded and social-handed in clipping 
off more dividends, turning out more 
ovens, and filling the earth with the smell 
of their prosperity, whilst bent women 
and cowed little children and muttering, 
unbrothered men scowl by, shedding the 
murk of their darkened lives into our 
windows? Can we not pass each other 
in the streets without knocking the skin 
off each other as we go by? Can this 
nation long endure half social and half 
savage? 

What is prosperity? One man of my 
acquaintance said that it was something 
that a man could have to share with an- 
other man, and straightway he went out 
and took a corner policeman out of a 
beating cold rain and put on him the best 
rubber outfit to be found. 

What is the Kingdom of God? Jesus 
said it was that thing that happened one 
139 



day when a man of Big Business came 
down out of his high place in a sycamore 
tree and with a new light on his face 
cried : "I'll give half of my fortune to the 
unfortunate; and if I have taken any- 
thing from anybody by wrong semiannual 
report or newspaper advertisement, I'll 
make it good four hundred per cent." 

If Zaccheus got tangled, to the jeopardy 
of his soul, in the simple business rela- 
tions of his small day in that obscure 
land, how shall an American of affairs, 
who looks not to his business as well as 
to his soul, escape? 

If that was evidently for him the 
obstruction to the coming Kingdom, 
which his conversion or salvation, or 
whatever you want to call it, had to take 
away, how can an American business man 
or any other business man be indifferent 
to the social bearings of his business? 

And if he found the re- organization of 
his business a great joy and took the 
Master home with him for the richest and 
best day of his life, why do not our sharp- 
scented men of trade get his secret and 
adopt his method? 

140 



But to take the Master home with one 
for a day is by no means enough. It is 
a beginning — yes, the beginning, but only 
the beginning. It would not seem at all 
like God to bring all this down to a mere 
personal affair between him and Zac- 
cheus, or even to a simple matter between 
Zaccheus and the tax dodgers or real es- 
tate victims or day laborers, who had 
dealt with him to their sorrow. There 
was all Jericho, and Judea, and Perea, and 
Sicily, and Samoa, and New York, and 
Borneo, and Atlanta, and Memphis, and 
Manchuria, and unto the uttermost parts 
of the earth. It is precisely these others, 
the community, the public, the national, 
aye, the international neighborhood, who 
compose a third party in the struggle to 
realize the Kingdom. 

When shall the individualists and the 
socialists, the aristocracies and democra- 
cies, the employer and the employed, the 
provincials and the nationals, step out of 
doors, straighten up, and look above this 
scuffle of civilization into the face of their 
ultimate, inextricable, mutual interests, 
and those of us all? Why shall we not 
141 



have these "bullies of wealth" and "bul- 
lies of poverty" alike, these potentates of 
war and these preachers of peace alike, to 
understand that they and all of us have 
infinitely more in common than we or 
they can possibly find to divide us? 

Let Capital, as well as Labor, compre- 
hend that the only trouble with the hun- 
gry and discontented is that they are not 
hungry and discontented enough, that 
they are hungry and discontented only 
for themselves. What we want them to 
do is to go on and be hungry and discon- 
tented for all the members of their class 
and of the capital classes and for all of 
us. 

Let Labor, as well as Capital, compre- 
hend that men who sweat at their shoul- 
ders are by no means the only laboring 
men ; that big brains, great grasp of wide 
relations, tracing crooked lines over paper 
for days and years, fighting to keep one's 
faith in men, and going on with the big 
enterprises indispensable to the common 
welfare, is a task which would put most 
so-called workingmen into the madhouse 
or into premature graves. These capital- 
142 



ists and rich people enterprise not too 
much, win not too much wealth, but only 
not enough. If they would only go on 
and enterprise more and grow more rich 
for themselves and their class and ours 
and everybody's ! 

It is a grand thing to find that men are 
coming to think vastly more of the right 
relations and uses of things than of the 
mere possession of things. It has been 
finely said that, just as men strove in the 
days immediately succeeding the great 
New Testament age to cast their new 
convictions and experiences into scholar- 
ly and logical formula and creed, and in 
the medieval ages to express their deep- 
est conceptions and feelings in physical 
art and architecture, so now we every- 
where discover an effort to conceive and 
realize men in their right relations to one 
another and to their place and work in the 
world. 

That is really what is meant by being 
social. And that is what, by many to- 
kens, blessed be God ! we are coming to. 

What, then, is the message of the 
Church, the whole Church, the simple, 
143 



social-hearted Church, the old, great- 
souled Church, to men of modern Indus- 
try, whether sweating outwardly with 
toil or bleeding inwardly with care, 
whether suffering from their own and 
others' injustice or waiting wistfully for 
the consolation of all? 

It is the message of the Mother to her 
children : 

Do you talk of justice, my Children? 
Of brotherhood and the uplifting of all 
together? These have been the founda- 
tions of my house from Sinai to the Ser- 
mon on the Mount ; the vines at my win- 
dow, from Rome and Geneva and Plym- 
outh Rock; the tears of my nights and 
the inspiration of my days, from the Bar- 
tholomew massacres to the Wesleyan re- 
vivals, from the Reformation in Europe 
to the wonderful missions in Africa, 
schools in the Orient, industries every- 
where. 

The ancient law, An eye for an eye and 
a tooth for a tooth, seems harsh and dis- 
graceful to you? You should have been 
back there with me, my Sons. That law 
was one of the longest strides of justice 
144 



I ever induced my family to take. Before 
that time and all around us, it was kill, 
raze, burn, obliterate in retaliation for the 
smallest offenses and often when there 
had been no offense whatever. It was a 
world of hurt and bleed, kill and damn; 
and well do I remember the load that fell 
from my heart when I got one branch- of 
our House to agree to stop with what 
seems to you now a bitter barbarism. 
Do you remind me of abominable sacri- 
fices, priestly infidelity, fool-hearted dog- 
ma, pious pretense, modern ecclesiasti- 
cism, and dead professions? They who 
practice these things, my Sons, are my 
selfish, spoiled, stubborn children, and 
your backward, ignorant Little Brothers. 
Be patient and trust them to me. They 
are indeed often worse prodigals than the 
Prodigal, for the Prodigal was spend- 
thrift with money and wayward in pas- 
sion; but these are reckless with justice 
and snobs in their Father's house. They 
have been, indeed, farther from the old 
home than any prodigal, in that distance 
that is not measured by miles, but by 
moral perception and the chords of the 
io 145 



heart. But you are young, my Children, 
and I am old. In the very household talk 
and the songs of the old inner courts, 
which they think they monopolize, are the 
ancient, heart-searching good tidings im- 
bedded, with all that you are saying of 
human justice and brotherhood. And 
they themselves cannot always miss it. 
They shall be your backward brothers, 
but they are your brothers surely, no less 
than these of the factories and streets. 
Be patient. 

Two notes of the Eternal Compassion 
my Message must have. And you must not 
forget. One is, Come, And one is, Go, 

One of my pastors in a certain town 
on a blazing afternoon called on a cer- 
tain human mother who lived in a rosy 
cottage upon a clean slope. Their talk 
was of the blazing sun, of the sleepy little 
town, of the Church (Myself), and of her 
handsome, rich, famous young son down 
in the village who had bought her the 
house, with its furniture and all that 
made so winsome the well-beseeming 
place. But in the end of the visit, coming 
around to the topic of her son, from which 
146 



she could never long refrain, the tears fell 
as she poured out to the pastor her sor- 
row over the fact that she had recently 
sent requesting her son to come to see 
her, and he had replied by sending her a 
ten-dollar bill ! There is the point, my Be- 
loved Sons. It is not your money. It is 
yourselves I call for. The Church does 
not, in the first place, need money to make 
her happy or great, does not crave half- 
million-dollar temples to seat less than a 
hundred pious pets. But you must not 
leave me for these things. You must the 
more come! I need you for them. They 
are in your Big Brotherhood also. I need 
you for the honor of our Ancient House 
and for the hope of our new and ever- 
widening program. You will not, when 
you understand, send me a contribution 
and remain absent yourselves. You will 
come to me, O my Sons, and we will sit 
in the old seats and sing the old songs 
and kindle the old memories and feed the 
old purposes awhile. 

Awhile! There is the word. Not to 
whine and chant around these perfumed 
altars when the ways of men are foul 
147 



with injustice and choked with wrong. 
Not to pray and to preach about the doing 
of the Father's will when we have sacri- 
ficed nothing, risked nothing, and done 
nothing to see to it that that will is done. 

Not in dumb resignation 

We lift our hands on high; 
Not as the nerveless fatalist, 

Content to trust and die: 
Our faith springs as the eagle, 

That soars to meet the sun; 
And cries exulting unto thee, 

O Lord, thy will be done! 

Thy will, it bids the weak be strong; 

It bids the strong be just; 
No lip to fawn, ro hand to crave, 

No brow to seek the dust! 
Wherever man oppresses man, 

Beneath thy liberal sun, 
O Lord, be there, thine arm make bare, 

Thy righteous will be done! 

And, O Men of the world's work — all 
of it ! I say to you, Go ! Go out into all 
the fields, fraternities, factories, shops, 
unions, parties, and departments of the 
world's whole big life, and there honor 
and establish the good name and fame 
and principles of the Old Home, which 
will be the New Kingdom. 
148 



THE CALL OF MICHELANGELO 



A Cartoon of Steadfastness 



Hallowed be Thy name, hallelujah I 

Infinite ideality. 

Immeasurable reality, 

Infinite personality — 
Hallowed be Thy name, hallelujah! 

Hallowed be Thy name, hallelujah! 
We know we are nothing, for all 

Is Thou and in Thee; 
We know we are something — that 

Too has come from Theet 
We know we are nothing, but 

Thou wilt help us to be, 
Hallowed be Thy name, hallelujah! 

—Unknown. 



THE CALL OF MICHELANGELO 

A Cartoon of Steadfastness 

jj|+fICHELANGELO had called on 
^ 1 1 his friend and fellow-artist and 
***r* found him absent. Seizing a 
crayon, he made one stroke on the can- 
vas and departed. The friend on return- 
ing saw the mark and exclaimed, "By my 
soul, Michelangelo!" 

A man's ideal is that which may be ex- 
pected of him. And all work and experi- 
ence, of whatever sort, are ever under an 
ideal of some sort. 

Yet it has been our one-sided supposi- 
tion that the matter of ideals is the con- 
cern alone of poets, seers, a few kings and 
world tinkerers, and that annual bevy of 
white-gowned girls who read us their 
ribboned dreams of the Italy that lies 
somewhere beyond the Alps. 

The conservation of the human record 
morally will come when we have cleared 
away that flat conceit that, so soon as we 
have quit the school and got well past the 
adumbration of the honeymoon, we no 
151 



longer have to do with ideals, and ideals 
have no longer anything which they can 
do to us. 

Jehu, the drayman, does not curry his 
horse, and his fellow drivers know him 
afar off by the condition of his beast. 
His ideal, none the less actual though un- 
worthy and none the less regnant though 
unrecognized, is to do as little work as 
possible and charge as much as possible 
for it. And Jehu cracks the whip in many 
a craft other than draying. 

A certain household has no path to the 
school; its daughters dress not tidily in 
the nose of the town. And you and I and 
all of us comprehend the dull and filthy 
ideal of that murk-minded cottage under 
the hill. So also the brave forewoman 
who died yesterday fighting through the 
choking smoke of the burning printery 
for her girls, and the gallant engineer 
pinned beneath the wreck of his engine 
and refusing the offered stimulant till 
men had smelled his breath to make sure 
his record was clear, and dying so — these 
have left us not without a misty discern- 
ment of the working ideals which sweeten 
152 



or degrade the great life of the people 
from sun to sun. 

It will be a grand time when the power 
of these unconscious life patterns is 
recognized; that from the world revival- 
ist to the world pugilist, from the Presi- 
dent to his coachman, wisdom is justified 
of all her children; that a man's ideal is 
that which may be expected of him, 
whether he has taken time to acquaint 
himself with it or not; and that no man, 
home, municipality, or empire can be 
found without it. 

Now, in the thought of the world's crea- 
tion, our ideal has been cataclysmic. We 
have read the romance of our mother earth 
in terms of flood and titanic commotion, 
of glacial epoch and volcanic upheaval. 

In respect of the political order, our 
way of thinking has been revolutionary. 
History, in the main, has been thought 
and recorded in the annals of princes and 
fine ladies, their laws and liaisons ; whilst 
the short and simple annals of the poor — 
which class has comprised the great ma- 
jority of those of us who are concerned — 
have been turned over to the elegies in 
153 



our churchyards or to the sermons there, 
which have sometimes differed from the 
elegies chiefly in being on the inside of 
the house. 

In the matter of the Christian experi- 
ence, the conception has been largely con- 
vulsive. The epic of the inner life has 
been handed down to us with a mighty 
weight laid on the capture and conviction 
of the rebel and on the burst of bliss, im- 
mediate, sufficient, and final, which fol- 
lowed. God's evangelist has at times 
been lost in the religious attorney-general 
bent on indictment, glorying in convic- 
tion, and famed for incarceration ; at other 
times he has lost himself in the passion- 
less ecclesiastical eunuch, waving per- 
fumed generalities to dope the soul. 

What the first-class preaching-man 
shall have to possess for his sustained 
career across the fluid, moving world is 
an outline survey in the back of his own 
head and the bottom of his own heart of 
the Christian religion in its relation to 
another ideal — namely, the educational 
ideal. And the field of this relation will 
be triangulated with three clear lines: 
154 



The Educational Ideal in Religious Ex- 
perience, The Educational Ideal in the 
Work of a Christian Church, and The 
Educational Ideal in the Realization of a 
Christian Lifetime. 

THE EDUCATIONAL IDEAL IN RELIGIOUS EX- 
PERIENCE 

Notwithstanding its errors and some- 
times in certain hands its horrors, the re- 
vival, which might better have been called 
a mission, will still be the indispensable 
instrument of the Heavenly Rescue. 

If the professional evangelist treads a 
perilous way, and if not one in a score 
has been able to continue a decade with- 
out mental or moral obliquity, yet the 
living pastorate may never lose from its 
vision that silhouette on the sky line, of 
the tender herdsman coming over the hill 
bearing the wanderer in his arms. Even 
if he could dismiss the sense of obligation 
and lose the faculty for pity, yet, and then 
more than ever, it were doubtless beyond 
us all to trace how far the safety of the 
myriad undershepherds themselves lies in 
that cartoon of the Eternal Compassion. 

Nevertheless, one may be permitted to 
155 



draw his perspective in such matters from 
the teaching of Jesus rather than from 
the headlines of the newspapers. If the 
big yellow-and-brindle dailies are serried 
with human malfeasance and hurt, yet 
there is a Volume of purple and gold in 
which it is set forth that some remained 
in the fold while the good shepherd went 
to bring back the sick and helpless and 
ready to die; and, though it is not in the 
language that he made some provision 
for the ninety and nine pending his re- 
turn, or that he hastened his return for 
their relief, one finds it hard to think that 
such a shepherd would fail at a point like 
that. We might recall that the recover- 
ing process was preceded and much of it 
avoided by the folding process. It would 
seem worth the trial, when we think of 
saving men, not alone to keep in mind 
that blessed ballad about throwing out the 
life line, but to get in mind another one 
on the sturdy old anchor line, even if 
somebody must write it out for us one 
of these fine mornings when no storm is 
on. Salvation is more than salvage. At 
all events, one feels sure in the trust that 
156 



the program of Jesus is no less to keep 
than to convert. 

Reverting to that familiar metaphor of 
the spiritual marine, would it not be 
something near a just view if one should 
regard the work of religious rescue and 
of religious world service, respectively, 
as standing in about the same propor- 
tions as those in which the work of rescue 
and of world service stand to each other, 
say, on the Atlantic Ocean? Without 
question, it is a perilous thing for those 
who go down to the sea in ships. For the 
first quarter of our Christian year the 
common papers area living library of the 
romance and risk and sad loss of it all. 
Furthermore, for all who go down to the 
deep and at all times there is the possi- 
bility of this fateful end; and it would be 
criminal and is now internationally un- 
thinkable that those in command of sea- 
going craft should fail to equip their ves- 
sels or to improve themselves in the in- 
struments, methods, and spirit of rescue. 
Yet would it not be a strange conceit for 
any life-saving crew to conclude that the 
whole traverse and traffic of the ocean 
157 



exist for their life-saving craft and not 
their rescue profession for world service? 

At any rate, if we in modern church 
consciousness, in respect of religious ex- 
perience, have tended to satisfy ourselves 
with an easier ideal which is critical and 
sensational rather than practical, and con- 
vulsive rather than continuous, such is 
not the original and Biblical ideal. 

If the Bible has been the world's won- 
der book, it has also been its textbook; 
if it has recorded miracles, it has supplied 
a curriculum. Your very word "repent" 
means change your mind, and that for 
the most of us will be about equal to a 
university course. Disciple is learner; 
Master is Teacher; "and this is life eter- 
nal, that they might know thee the only 
true God, and Jesus Christ whom thou 
hast sent." Surely it has been our hasty 
and unhistorical thinking and sometimes 
our refusal to think at all which in vast 
areas of religious consciousness has re- 
sulted in the arrest of Christianity and 
our moral incompetency. 

But let us look once at the classic pas- 
sage of religious experience in the Pau- 
158 



line ideal. It may be of a relevant inter- 
est and of some worth to the inquiry we 
are making to state that the following 
declaration came to the writer as in a 
vision more than twenty years ago, that 
he can put his hand on the maple tree 
where it first shone, and that for these 
two decades as he looks back it has stood 
to him as the complete argument and idyl 
of an initial and continuous religious ex- 
perience, which, how far soever it has 
fallen short of the pattern, yet remains 
absolutely the clearest fact in conscious- 
ness : "For, if when we were enemies we 
were reconciled to God by the death of 
his Son, much more, being reconciled, we 
shall be saved in his life," There it is: 
the reconciliation — yes, and the life flow- 
ing on! The argument and advance of 
God's grace from and after the atone- 
ment; the much-moreness of God's way 
of saving and of the Christian's way of 
seeing his salvation. 

The Cross can no man discount. — At 
once the blessed symbol and standard of 
the Eternal Innocence and Compassion! 
But the Cross is not all — nay, but hear 
Paul and not one of us — it is not the 
159 



greatest factor in the Gospel. God's love, 
bridging the quarrel and spite and perdi- 
tion of human sin; God's life, flowing 
forth and finding the dead veins of man's: 
nothingness; God himself in uprightness 
and holy love seeking afar the sons that 
bear his image — is greater than his Cross. 
And our life, our life "in him," from and 
beyond that Cross, and not alone our 
having been reconciled out of our hor- 
rible mutiny and disaster — this is the just 
construction of that Divine Event in his 
love's greater quest. 

It cannot be the central fact of Chris- 
tianity that God was angry, that the Di 
vine Holiness meant and was that more 
than anything else, and that if his Son 
had not died he himself could never have 
taken any interest in our state. 

It cannot be that Jesus was somehow 
better than God, and that, while it would 
not have been exactly right for God to get 
mixed up with us, yet Christ came plead- 
ing: 

The Father hears Him pray, 

His dear anointed One; 
He cannot turn away 

The presence of his Son, 
1 60 



It cannot be that the devil had some 
rights which had to be respected ; that he 
threatened to make some sort of trouble 
if, after we had so transgressed, his 
claims on us were not regarded; and that 
God and Jesus and Satan got together 
out there in the infinite somewhere — we 
being, like sheep in the shambles and not 
the sheep of his pasture, omitted from 
the council, our intellect unenlisted, our 
moral nature uninvolved — and worked 
out a "scheme of redemption" whereby 
God might be just and the justifier of 
many. 

No, no ! God was out there seeking for 
his children, whithersoever they had wan- 
dered and fallen in the wilderness and 
pitch-black maze of our moral despair. 
And he, the Father, was bent on coming 
in, as he had a right to come in ; on mak- 
ing his way past the old deadening of our 
brush-heap moral laws and barbed-wire 
oppositions; and he made it all tremble 
and darken and shudder where he passed 
that day ; and the Cross is the place where 
he rent his blessed side on the spear of 
our cruel unbeii$£! The earth itself has 
ii 161 



never been the same since it drank that 
royal and innocent blood, and human his- 
tory is forever another thing with the 
shadow of that Cross athwart it. But the 
great, joyous, unspeakable thing is that 
he was coming in! and that he did come 
in, crowding humanity's heart and con- 
sciousness with the reformation of a bet- 
ter hope and the transformation of a bet- 
ter likeness "in his life." 

If a man's little child must needs be 
punished; and if, on being forgiven and 
sent on to her play, she comes again tear- 
stained and still grieved with the old of- 
fense, he gathers her in his arms and, as- 
suring her once more, kisses her shining 
head and walks out to give her a good 
start for the day. But if she continues to 
come and cry about him, plucking his 
sleeve to the interruption of his work and 
the spoiling of her own happiness in a 
perpetual eddying round that dark recon- 
ciliation, still beseeching a forgiveness 
which has been already abundantly be- 
stowed, and unable to think either of his 
love or of her play and work and life in 
his home by any other terms than of a 
162 



conflict, even of a conflict which has been 
composed, then the good man will see her 
mother about a doctor. And — let us ask 
it reverently — what if in moral indolence 
and morbid egoism the Church, the little 
daughter of God, has been found pouting 
out many of her golden hours and decades 
in a dead and deadening eddy about the 
reconciliation point in religious experi- 
ence? 

Doubtless it will be far from any of us 
to suppose that all this goes to the bot- 
tom of the meaning of the Cross. The 
red murder and black mystery of Gol- 
gotha were something more than a viola- 
tion of the color scheme of good taste in 
the communication between heaven and 
earth. Infolded with the sanctity of 
heaven's ambassage and of humanity's 
holiest sacrifice, it represents in some 
mystic and immeasurable way the whole 
solemnity of what man is to God and 
what God is to man. It is the insignia of 
the state of God's mind toward the fath- 
omless horror of sin, and toward the pres- 
ent condition, indeed, of those who re- 
main in unbelief. But it is a poor use of 
163 



insignia to mistake them for that which 
they signify, as one has seen frivolous 
women dangle little golden crosses on 
their necklaces as ornaments in the 
streets. A soldier's epaulettes are not to 
be confused with his courage and loyalty 
and fighting will. And the wedding 
ring may not compass all the love and de- 
votion and life-in-life which it symbol- 
izes. If there had never been an epaulette 
or a wedding ring, there would surely, 
nevertheless, have been marrying and 
fighting. And had there been no Gol- 
gotha with its dark tree, one cannot bring 
himself to think that the Father had not 
fought for his children, nor that the para- 
ble of the Bridegroom and his Marriage 
Feast is but false. 

At all events, it is Paul, and none other, 
who at once confesses and at the same 
time construes the atonement, blesses the 
Cross, and from it discovers the path of 
the fuller life projected. 

THE EDUCATIONAL IDEAL IN THE WORK OF A 
CHRISTIAN CHURCH 

A jaybird is said to build her nest 
equally as well as jaybirds did three hun- 
164 



dred years ago, and no better. And an 
ancient religious poet has written: 

The sparrow hath found her an house, 
And the swallow a nest for herself, 
Where she may lay her young, 
Even thine altars, O Lord of hosts, 
My King and my God. 

The question would be, whether this ex- 
quisite tribute to the Church applies to 
her method and administration or to her 
sweet and spacious hospitality toward 
our buffeted little lives. 

Some scientists tell us, as though we 
needed any telling, that a human mind 
could not be put into a simian brain. 
And our problem here is to ascertain 
whether a Church that is solely or ex- 
cessively traditional and statical in the 
conception of its own function will an- 
swer for a religious experience to which, 
as it appears, there has been set absolute- 
ly no bound save the breadth and depth 
and height and length of the life of God. 
Could it be otherwise than that the im- 
provable experience, which we have seen 
to be the program of the Bible, the ideal 
of St. Paul, and the injunction of Jesus, 
165 



would work itself out in an improvable 
policy and practice in the Christian or- 
ganization? 

No argument will here be made for the 
institutional Church nor against it. The 
question is not as to the theory of the 
value of any given method or equipment. 
The inquiry shall be whether an institu- 
tion that is based and builded on human 
experience — that is to say, on the aggre- 
gate of personal experiences — which hu- 
man experience under the Biblical and 
Christian ideal is found to be educational 
and educative — whether this institution 
itself will not also develop a correspond- 
ing educational and advancive quality; 
whether, the more the experience en- 
hances "in his life," it will not also the 
more express itself in his service ; whether, 
the bigger the humanity grows, it will not 
develop a farther reach and cast a bigger 
shadow, "that at the least its shadow 
passing by might overshadow some of 
them." If it be not inconceivable that 
somebody is one day to write another 
hymn intrinsically as good as "Jesus, 
Lover of my soul," will it be ecclesiasti- 
166 






cal treason to have faith enough in the 
Church to believe that she may retain her 
power of approach to humanity when, 
say, the "mourners' bench" has gone — 
her approach, if need be, being to a car- 
penter's bench, as in the beginning? 

But, furthermore, when we look into all 
the parallel lines of human interest, 
it is apparent that every other organ, in- 
stitution, or implement with which the 
human spirit realizes itself or performs 
its work comes under this like law of bet- 
terment, this thought, view, and habit of 
improvement in work. Let one cast away 
his ratiocinations and take a walk down 
to the car shops or secure a half hour in 
his wife's kitchen, if he will agree to keep 
out of the way there. From the building 
of a bridge to the baking of a biscuit, it 
is seen that every other human thing — 
fashion, tool, process, and point of view — 
is subject to the blessed law of improve- 
ment and of hope. One's dear old aunt 
in the antiquity of forty years ago took 
cotton and carded, spun, wove, cut, 
and made it into one's little cottonade 
pantaloons — all under the shade of the 
167 



same big silver poplar tree. But she 
would not do that now. She would not 
even pause to call them that, but would 
cut them off at the first syllable. And 
that is the reign of the educational ideal 
from and beyond the spinning jenny. Is 
it to be all otherwise in the work and life 
of the Church? Is our thought of the 
divine program for the organ of religious 
service, an institution which has been 
so invested with human nature and so 
freighted with human need, to be inferior 
to this? Is the Church of God but a 
growthless image of Athena among these 
myriad other-interests-of-lif e ? 

To such questions one of three answers 
seems inevitable. 

Either the Church of yesterday was 
made perfect and supplied with perfect 
methods and instruments for the per- 
formance of its perpetual task and there- 
fore has no need to alter them. 

Or it was at least made as good as it 
was capable of becoming, serving noble 
ends in the past, but manifestly a tran- 
sient and not a permanent institution, for 
the reason that, unlike every other insti- 
168 



tution in the service of man, it is incapa- 
ble of adjustment with him along the up- 
ward path to his goal. 

Or it is susceptible of a vital adapta- 
tion and progress in instruments, meth- 
ods, and measures. And the Church, like 
the Sabbath, was made for man and not 
man for the Church. 

THE EDUCATIONAL IDEAL IN THE REALIZATION 
OF A CHRISTIAN LIFETIME 

In any business a man would justly 
expect to recover his principal. On in- 
vestments in realty men are entitled to 
the expectation of coming out whole, 
save, it would appear, on the investment 
of themselves, save in the realization of 
a Christian lifetime. 

Within the last century we have dis- 
covered the children; in the last quarter 
century we have recognized the women; 
and since about the day before yesterday 
we have been attempting to corral the 
men. 

It ought in accuracy to be said that we 

have been re-doing some of this; for 

Moses was found in the reed-rocked 

cradle, and Jesus escaped the bore of the 

169 



crowd in the society of little children be- 
fore Raikes had ever rung his bell, or 
Froebel found what was already growing 
in the kindergarten. Woman's ultimate 
right and rationale was secure from the 
first rib, "for no man ever yet hated his 
own flesh"; and Miriam, Deborah, and 
Hannah, with that Mary group holding 
their own against the faithlessness of the 
mere disciples and the fury of the mob 
about His Cross, have little to ask of any- 
body's precious recognition ; whilst 
Brother Joseph of Arimathea, Brother 
Cornelius of Cesarea, and Brother Good 
Samaritan, with all the shining lists of 
like-minded good men, were going down 
to Jericho in a better manner than some 
priests and Levites before Brother Vo- 
ciferous Frockcoat had apparently waked 
up to the meaning and obligation of the 
Christian laity. Let it go at that. But 
what nobody in Christendom has yet put 
into a discovery, recognition, or move- 
ment is a Christian old age — that is to say, 
an honest notion of a whole hundred-per- 
cent human life. How rarely in the hymn 
of grace we go on to the stanza, 
170 



The Lord has promised good to me; 

His word my hope secures; 
He will my shield and portion be 

As long as life endures! 

Here and there, to vary the monotony, 
somebody "puts on" an old folks' meeting ; 
and if it goes well, we love to ride the 
crest of the wave with — 

E'en down to old age all my people shall prove 
My sovereign, eternal, unchangeable love. 

But if a man regards this as an idle in- 
quiry, if it is supposed that the question 
is only an economic one, affecting the 
aged of the poorer classes alone, then let 
him get leave to go with his pastor six 
afternoons in the year. Let him witness 
the wistful and sometimes, what is 
worse, the insensate silences, excuses, 
deprecations, and dodges of and for old 
age. Request the pastor to draw forth 
his portfolio of experiences in the evening 
and recount the old people of a decade's 
ministry, recalling how many, rich or 
poor, have realized a sustained, sweet- 
minded afternoon and life end, unterrified 
by the rustling of the sear and yellow 
171 



leaf, but gathering through its refined 
transparency the green-turning-to-gold 
of a perfect evening hour, wherein 

The weary sun hath made a golden set, 
And by the bright track of his fiery car 
Gives promise of a goodly day to-morrow. 

Question: Has the God of life bungled? 
Is life to be left unsuccored at just the 
point when the legitimate dividends on 
its investments would be needed and sup- 
posed to accrue? In the Christian econo- 
my what is old age for? If Oslerism was 
a ghastly joke, and if the noble physician 
was misrepresented, what gave the joke 
a vogue so wide, and who has taken pains 
to offer and emphasize a welcome substi- 
tute for it? Are these nine-out-of-ten 
Jacobs from mid-life and on, whom we 
hear calling their days few and evil and 
preferring to die "in the harness," war- 
ranted in this quadruped conception of 
the human career? When we say, as we 
are forever saying, that we hope to pass 
out before we become helpless, do we 
mean that we wish to go to our own 
graves with a spade in our hands? In the 
matter of making out a lifetime, are we 
172 



so immersed in our own animalism that, 
despite all our resentment and bitter de- 
nial, our progress from infancy through 
maturity to decay is at last limited and 
conditioned thereby? Is the road to 
heaven — "and the Way ye know" — well 
surveyed and safe, after all, if the last 
quarter of it is broken by a morose, dis- 
appointed, and thumb-twirling old age? 

Now, if there is any reality back of all 
this questioning, if we have before us any 
such depletion and life need, then, as in 
the rediscovery of the Christian gospel of 
childhood, of womanhood, and of man- 
hood, we shall have also to consult our 
Christian program afresh here. That 
program has been found to unfold far 
enough backward to recover to us the lost 
significance of infancy and youth; far 
enough laterally to rehabilitate woman- 
hood, on the one hand, and to reinterpret 
manhood to itself, on the other. What 
has it to say for us on this embitterment 
or anesthetization of our life's later 
years? on this cul de sac of senility and 
unhappiness? Surely, in view of its his- 
torical adequacy, it will yield some 
173 



guarantee, inspiration, and blessing which 
shall serve not simply for an hour's rally 
or a big collection, but for the sum total 
of my selfhood ; not alone for its new birth 
and martial enlistment, but for its honor- 
able discharge and peaceful retirement; 
some unsounded word of the Eternal 
Compassion, which, recovered, will trans- 
pose this heart-breaking anticlimax. 

My own glad belief is that this word 
is waiting and that, being interpreted, it 
would come to something like the follow- 
ing: 

Ye precious semi-pagans ! As far as ye 
have gotten with the golden gospel I gave 
you is to have opened your eyes to the 
mystic morning splendor of it; to have 
reveled in the spectacular medieval art 
and allegory of it; and, latterly, to have 
engrossed your anxious thoughts and 
kneaded your sweaty hands in the organ- 
ized administration and numerical com- 
petition of it. Not that any of this or all 
of it is too much; it is only not enough! 
But ye have the industrial ideal ; ye would 
still Uzzah my Ark and underpin the 
Kingdom of Heaven. The princes of this 
174 



world have exercised lordship over you, 
and ye have borne those burdens till ye 
cannot straighten even when ye stand; 
your arms are bent even when your hands 
are empty. And something of that weary 
crook is in your minds. Ye have the no- 
tion of serving and come in my presence 
talking of "morning services" and "eve- 
ning services," when there is really noth- 
ing there for you to do save to listen and 
rest and learn. 

Henceforth ye are to cherish the notion 
of serving, and ye are to practice the joy 
of living also ; ye are to break the menial 
habit, for I have called you sons and 
friends, not serfs and Gradgrinds, least 
of all officials and strutting tetrarchs. 
Ye must recover your lost mysticism and 
walk with me again in the cool of the 
day. There is as much of mysticism and 
of communion in the evening as in the 
morning. If your mountain passes re- 
sound with my going forth in the morn- 
ing, your vespers shall reflect my twilight 
return. I will not leave you nor forsake 
you ; I have not called you to take of my 
life because I need you to do my work; 
175 



but I am sure you will want to share in 
my work, because I have given you to 
enter my life. Keep your industrial ideal, 
but accept the ideal of my school. Still 
learn of me; learn not simply to bear my 
yoke, but to live my life. Ye shall not 
merely earn your wage ; ye shall win your 
freedom and find your peace. 

If the faith of our Christ has gone with 
you only till ye have grown weary and 
full of need, he is a better Brother than 
ye have known, and he has had things to 
say to you which ye could not bear until 
now. And the Father — he still sits on the 
stairway of the stars. Everywhere those 
faithful stars keep their downward 
watches; everywhere his presence brush- 
es your spirits, as your mothers' skirts 
swept your faces w T hen ye played on the 
floor at their feet. Be steadfast ! As cer- 
tain of your own poets have said: 

Grow old along with me! 
The best is yet to be, 
The last of life, for which the first was made: 
Our times are in His hand, 
Who saith, "A whole I planned"; 
Youth sees but half; trust God; see all, nor be 
afraid. 

176 



